Case Study — Radiant x Arbitrum x Chainlink
Interview Questions and Answers:
- Name and role at Radiant
Roger, Director of Marketing & Business Development
2. What sets Radiant apart as a platform?
Radiant Protocol’s value proposition includes:
⦁First omnichain money market: Radiant aims to be the first omnichain money market, allowing users to deposit any major asset on any major chain and borrow various supported assets across multiple chains. Users can deposit and borrow assets across chains seamlessly within minutes, solving many DeFi pain points related to requiring multiple transactions to lend, borrow, bridge, and swap.
⦁Consolidation of fragmented liquidity: The primary goal of the Radiant DAO is to consolidate the approximately $22 billion of fragmented liquidity currently dispersed across the top ten alternative layers
⦁Gated emissions: The Radiant DAO implemented a Dynamic Liquidity (dLP) mechanism, which only enables incentivized RDNT emissions to dLP providers. Dynamic Liquidity Provisioners also share in the utility of platform fees captured in blue-chip assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB, and stablecoins through borrowing interest, flash loans, and liquidations.
⦁Governance of the Radiant DAO: RDNT token holders also gain governance power over the Radiant Protocol and DAO, allowing them to create proposals and discuss protocol improvements, as well as vote on on-chain proposals.
3. What is the unique advantage of building on Arbitrum? Why did you choose to build on Arbitrum?
A lending protocol must operate on a network with high activity volume and broad institutional adoption to operate at full capacity. There are many L1 options, but Ethereum remains the most utilized. Historically, however, it has been marred by high transaction fees.
The optimistic rollup solutions implemented by the Arbitrum network embody the present and future of Ethereum scaling.
Additionally, the DeFi ecosystem within Arbitrum is vibrant, growth on the chain is at all-time highs, and many protocols on the chain cooperate together to form synergistic relationships that benefit the end-user.
4. What are the team members’ backgrounds?
Radiant Capital has a team of 14, formerly from Morgan Stanley, Apple, and Google, who have been in DeFi since the early days of summer 2020, and many of us in crypto since 2015.
Given our traditional finance background, we LOVED what we saw in DeFi.
We saw the potential and many use cases.
But, we also saw the pain points, and that’s why many DeFi 1.0 tokens did not perform well.
We think the Metaverse is going to get 1000x bigger, and Internet Money is the key to unlocking that — which is why we’re building the first protocol that bridges together the billions in fragmented internet money across all the various blockchains.
So we kept having conversations around this, saw DeFi 1.0 unfold, and basically decided to pool three years of funding together, quit our jobs and start working on our vision which is called Radiant.
5. How do Chainlink Price Feeds fit into the picture for Radiant?
Radiant Capital has been working with the Chainlink Labs team to ensure the highest level of security with the implementation of Chainlink Price Feeds.
Chainlink enables dApps to reliably connect to any external API and leverage secure off-chain computation to unlock more advanced use cases.
Radiant utilizes high-quality data from Chainlink Price Feeds to help secure its money markets.
Radiant also plans to create a price feed for the RDNT token, which plays a critical role in determining eligibility for emissions and enables independent developers to build on top of Radiant.
6. Why did you choose to build with Chainlink? What does Chainlink uniquely unlock for the Arbitrum ecosystem?
After initially reviewing various oracle solutions, we integrated Chainlink Price Feeds upon launch because they provide a multitude of critical features such as:
- High-Quality Data — Chainlink Price Feeds source data from numerous premium data aggregators. This leads to price data aggregated from hundreds of exchanges, weighted by volume, and cleaned of outliers and wash trading. As a result, Chainlink’s data aggregation model generates precise global market prices that are inherently resistant to inaccuracies or manipulation of any single or small set of exchanges.
- Secure Node Operators — Chainlink Price Feeds are secured by independent, security-reviewed, and Sybil-resistant oracle nodes run by leading blockchain DevOps teams, data providers, and traditional enterprises. In addition, Chainlink nodes have a strong track record of reliability, even during periods of high gas prices and infrastructure outages.
- Decentralized Network — Chainlink Price Feeds are decentralized at the data source, oracle node, and oracle network levels, generating strong protections against downtime and tampering by either the data provider or oracle network.
- Reputation System — Chainlink provides a robust reputation framework and set of on-chain monitoring tools that allow users to independently verify the historical and real-time performance of node operators and oracle networks.
7. What specific key results have already been achieved (user growth, new markets, liquidity, total value locked, engineering time saved, etc.)?
Radiant holds the #1 lending market spot in terms of TVL ($129M) and daily user metrics on Arbitrum, according to DefiLlama. As of March 27, Radiant has expanded to the BNB Chain, and has already attracted an additional $71 Million TVL.
Chainlink Price Feeds will enable Radiant to quickly and seamlessly add collateral support in the near future for high-demand tokens such as ARB (Arbitrum’s native token) and stETH (Lido’s staked Ethereum). This saves the Radiant Engineering team countless hours — rather than building the initial oracle implementation and continuously maintaining it, we simply integrate Chainlink Price Feeds proven to be secure, reliable, and decentralized.
8. What was your experience like working with Chainlink Labs & Offchain Labs?
Working with the Chainlink Labs & Offchain Labs teams was an incredibly positive experience. Their technical expertise, ability to collaborate, and professionalism helped amplify Radiant’s success as an omnichain money market. Their communication skills and ability to work under pressure were particularly noteworthy, and they were always willing to share their ideas and make decisions collectively. Thanks to their hard work, we were able to achieve our goals and make a significant impact in the blockchain space. We look forward to future collaborations with the Chainlink Labs and Offchain Labs teams and highly recommend them from a technical standpoint!
9. What are your long-term objectives for Radiant? How does it fit into the future of Web3?
Radiant Protocol launched on July 24, 2022. At the time, Radiant was (and still is) DeFi’s first cross-chain money market, where users can seamlessly deposit and borrow assets across blockchains. This means that a user can deposit collateral on Arbitrum to borrow digital assets on BNB Chain, within a few minutes or less
Compared to other money markets, there is significant value accrual (“Real Yield”) to token holders in the form of protocol fees. Thus far, roughly $7m in revenue has accrued to the protocol. This yield is earned by RDNT lockers in the form of BTC, ETH, USDC, USDT, and Stablecoins. Radiant is quite unique in this respect, giving yield in Blue-Chip assets, whereas others often offer governance-related rewards.
After working with our community (over 20% token-holder participation in governance) and several advisors, we developed Radiant v2.
After eight months of development by a team of 14, it is live. These Medium posts do a good job of summarizing the product Roadmap, Parts 1 and Part 2:
https://medium.com/@RadiantCapital/cryptos-most-profitable-protocol-a-new-era-for-defi-b374ca82a741
https://medium.com/@RadiantCapital/defis-most-profitable-protocol-part-two-7ab13b11c2c2
This website showcases the community-generated and voted-on proposals for v2 Mechanics, including changes to protocol fee distribution (even more to users), vesting timelines, runway expansions, and other changes.
Collateral Additions
⦁In v1, Radiant was intentionally super conservative on collateral (3crv + BTC/ETH only) as we saw tons of money markets fail due to poor risk parameters or improper collateral parameters.
⦁In v2, Radiant will work to add new collateral options in lend-only markets (at first) to further expand users’ cross-chain borrowing power. For ARBI, think GLP/MAGIC/STG. where users can collateralize their tokens and then borrow on BNB Chain if they so choose. These will all be done with hyper-conservative parameters to let markets scale securely.
X-Chain Functionality
⦁Currently on v1, you can go into Radiant on Arbitrum and borrow on Avalanche in a couple of minutes or less.
⦁With v2, you can have several new “home chains” where you can deposit collateral. The first new deployment of Radiant on v2 will be on BNB Chain (~Feb 20)
⦁On v2, we’re also expanding this to include a new set of collateral assets (think, borrow against your ARBI MAGIC on Mainnet or get additional leverage on ARBI to lever up)
Here is the current roadmap:
