Overview

From Piers Ridyard, CEO at Radix DLT.

The last two weeks have been an absolute whirlwind in the world crypto and the wider financial markets. For those who have been following the WallStreetBets and GameStop saga - this is a wild ride that may end up being pivotal for the crypto industry.

Here’s why; when it was just “the internet” vs hedge funds, it was an interesting new development in how social media and finance are smashing together to create new emergent behaviour. That’s interesting on it’s own, and is likely to be just a taste of what social finance has in store for us in the future.

However - when Robin Hood stopped their 13 million users from being able to trade in GameStop (plus a few other “meme” stocks), it created a new narrative - one where unstoppable finance (aka DeFi) suddenly becomes a lot clearer as to why it might be needed by the world.

If a company (that literally calls itself Robin Hood) can single handedly stop 13 million people from buying something which is still being able to be bought by elites such as hedge fund managers, THAT is a spark for a realisation that change is necessary.

And that spark is necessary. Using crypto is still hard. Decentralised finance is still hard. There is a learning curve to get yourself up to be able to use DeFi. To quote Nietzsche -

‍“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

‍It is these moments in time that give a new perspective to people and start passing on the crypto “why”. For Satoshi it was the second bailout of the banks in 2008 that continued to take value away from the majority (savers and everyday people) and give it to the minority (the bankers that had profited from their own excess and then been given a government handout).

For DeFi, moments like Robin Hood stopping the little guy from being able to participate in the market when wealthier people are not given the same barriers show us why DeFi is worthwhile to build. Fundamentally it comes down to trying to give the same freedom and choice to everyone.Otherwise, work at Radix has been going well too! Read on for more details...

Development Update

From Russell Harvey, CTO & Matthew Hine, Head of Product at Radix DLT.A few points of interest taken from the team’s resolved items list:

• We continue to refine mempool management, such as having nodes automatically reject (before consensus) atoms that are clearly invalid or are known to conflict with existing committed state.
• Node-runner clients are now able to query the delegator status of the node (is it accepting delegated stake or not) and the total stake currently delegated to it.
• Since we carried much code over from the previous Tempo-based network, we did some clean-up of the atom structure design to better reflect the way we expect REv2 to use atoms in the future.
• We continue to add to our test and monitoring infrastructure, with our internal dashboard now including monitoring of Jenkins, our faucets, and metrics exporters.

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Strategy Update

From Adam Simmons, Head of Strategy at Radix DLT. It’s been a busy few weeks as the team have been settling into the new year, with progress being made on some large milestones going forward including:

• The Radix 2021 Roadmap was brought into focus in a blog explaining what to expect from the newly named releases planned: Olympia and Alexandria. These two major releases lay the foundations of both the consensus layer and application layer of the Radix public network.
• There has been continued growth in the official Radix channels, with combined followers now approaching 40,000.
• Jacob has recently joined Radix as the Social Media Manager and has been working alongside Mikael, our Head of Community, to look at how we can improve the Radix Subreddit over the coming months.
• Since listing on Bitfinex on Jan 21st, eXRD has seen an average 24h trading volume of just over $2m (up-to Jan 31st). Alongside Bitfinex, there is still ~$17m of Liquidity on Uniswap for eXRD.
• To continue to build a healthy ecosystem for eXRD, we are engaged in active discussions with other major exchanges for eXRD as well as other activities that will help to increase eXRD distribution ahead of the Radix mainnet.
• Work is continuing into the next phase of the Radvocates program, and while it is not quite ready to be revealed yet, it is still important to highlight members of the Radix community going the extra mile. In this Radix Report, we want to highlight the work being done by @blind5ight who has been active in the official Radix channels helping to give excellent summaries of Radix to newcomers, as well guide people to where they can find more information.

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Media/Community

Another 2 busy weeks in media and community have passed, see some highlights listed below:

• A great interview with Piers and REIMAGINE2020 and another interview with the Blockhash podcast
• A blog was published welcoming 2 key hires, Russell and Raul,  formerly working at Microsoft, Kaiser Permanente and ConsenSys
• Research firm Upblock published an in-depth Research Report about Radix. Also, Radix has been added to Moonwalker’s legendary Moonranking. Internationally, Radix has been reviewed by the Turkish influencer Kripto Sözlük and by the Russian influencer Crypto Lady. International activities will likely pick up over the next months
• On 22nd of January Radix celebrated being the top project by social activity
• The first round of the Community Trade Contest* has ended and the Top 50 winners have received the total of $20,000 worth of prices. Currently round 2 is in full effect, the Radix Ecosystem team wishes all participants good luck!
• And finally, Radix was covered in various media article, including in ‘10 Under The Radar DeFi Projects With Massive Potential’ (Yahoo Finance), ‘Protocol Alternatives That Challenge Ethereum’ (Hackernoon) and ‘Radix: A unicorn’s race to solving the blockchain quadrilemma’ (KnowTechie). Several Radix whales were also quoted in the interesting article ‘Crypto Whales Weigh in as Industry Rally Continues’ (The Daily Chain)

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*activity that is happening independently of any Radix entity or employee, but that we think is cool!