RADIX AMA Recap
To help celebrate the listing of Radix DLT on AscendEX, AscendEX’s Mary Zheng sat down for an AMA with Radix’s CEO Piers Ridyard to gain more insight into the project’s success and strategy for the future.
Mary Zheng | AscendEX
Hi @piersr For those unfamiliar, can you briefly describe Radix DLT and what problems you are trying to solve?
Piers | Radix
Radix is a layer 1 protocol, like Ethereum or Polkadot, but built specifically to serve DeFi. We like to say it is layer 1 DeFi done right. This is because Radix is the only decentralized network where developers will be able to build quickly without the constant threat of exploits and hacks, where every improvement will get rewarded, and where scale will never be a bottleneck.
We solve three key issues in DeFi.
1. DeFi developers spend up to 90% of their time securing their code rather than building functionality.
2. Community developers are not really rewarded for their open source contributions, slowing the pace of innovation in DeFi.
3. DeFi networks are completely congested, leading to high transaction fees and slow networks.
We solve these three issues in the following ways:
1. A purpose built DeFi programming environment that will enable fast AND secure development. This allows DeFi developers to concentrate their time on actually building new DeFi applications rather than most of their time on security.
2. A system of on-ledger royalties that will reward those that contributed dApp code to the ecosystem. This ensures that everyone that contributes code towards making it easier and safer to build DeFi dApps on Radix gets rewarded.
3. A consensus algorithm that will provide unlimited scalability without breaking DeFi composability. This means that on Radix DeFi should always be cheap and fast.
Mary Zheng | AscendEX
Great, let’s transition a bit towards the native token — XRD. How does the XRD token function within the platform and why is it needed?
Piers | Radix
Sure — the native token of Radix is the XRD. The eXRD is the wrapped XRD on Ethereum. It allows users to move easily between the Ethereum and Radix ecosystem.
The native token, XRD, is the token that is used to pay for transactions, to deploy code, to use DeFi applications on top of Radix. You can think of it very much like ETH on Ethereum.
As a layer 1 protocol secured by POS, the XRD is also used for staking and lets anyone stake to secure the network. If you do that, you can also earn part of the 300m XRD that are emitted every year to those that are staking to secure the network.
So — the token is for transactions, for staking and for DeFi on Radix.
Mary Zheng | AscendEX
That is pretty cool. Could you also share the development status and progress of the project thus far? Including the major partners and perhaps some statistics.
Piers | Radix
We have just finished our Betanet testing period and our mainnet is now ready to go live. The go-live date is the 28th of July (so in around 4-week time). Over the past 4 months, Radix has seen more than 400% growth in token holders and an 81% increase in market cap.
Our mainnet go-live is called Olympia; the “Olympia” release of Radix is a generational improvement in the history of decentralized ledger computing, with more than 100 times executional efficiency compared to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
We are also launching both Instapass and Instabridge. Instapass, a powerful service that enables “1-click compliance” for any decentralized application (dApp). With Instapass, a user will be able to provide the necessary information to meet regulatory requirements one time only and then share those credentials (with permission) to any dApp as necessary. Instapass will revolutionize dApp development by simplifying the process of integrating compliance functionality, accelerating time-to-market and reducing compliance risk for businesses.
It is not required to use the Radix network, but it is a powerful tool for any developer building on Radix to leverage.
Other partners include Ren, Chainlink, Quanstamp and others. These will be rolled out as we release each upgrade to the Radix public network over the next couple of years, taking us from merely scalable and high throughput, to linearly scalable by the time we get to our Xi’an release in 2023.
Mary Zheng | AscendEX
Appreciate the detail here. May I ask who will be the users/clients on your platform and what are some examples of use cases for them?
Piers | Radix
Radix is built for DeFi, so we will expect to see DeFi builders and users on Radix. This includes constant function market makers like Uniswap or Sushiswap, lending protocols like Aave or Compound, stable coins like DAI or USDC, options and derivative systems like Synthetix and UMA as well as many DeFi innovations still to come. DeFi is only just getting started, eventually every single person in the world is going to have a better choice of financial products and opportunities to save and invest than using centralized services — it is a question of when, rather than if.
The way that Radix makes sure that is happening faster is building the difficult parts to make it as easy as possible for developers to win by picking Radix as the platform they build their decentralised finance project on. This is in all aspects of what we are building, from the easier to use DeFi programming language, Scrypto, as well as the more scalable network to keep the cost to developers and users down.
We believe the future of finance is decentralized, and we are building the platform to make sure that happens as quickly as possible.
Mary Zheng | AscendEX
Let’s talk about the current landscape of other projects doing similar things. What differentiates you from some of your competitors?
Piers | Radix
Sure — our main competitors are protocols like Ethereum or Solana or Avalanche.
Each of these are taking a different approach to one part of the problem: scale. Ethereum is relying on things like layer 2 solutions to provide greater throughput, Solana is sacrificing decentralisation to achieve high throughput and Avalanche has released a sub-net style system to allow for more throughput. Each of these approaches are flawed, but without going into the details — here are the highlights as to why; The current global financial system does around 2m transactions per second. That is across FX, shares, bonds, and fiat payments, all put together. DeFi increases the throughput needed because it is all one connected system — a single transaction on Uniswap ends up being 10, 20 or even 50 other smart contract updates and interactions. This means that bringing the current global financial system onto public ledgers will probably require 20m — 100m transactions per second.
On Ethereum, polygon can do 7,000TPS
Avalanche maxes out at 2,500 TPS
Solana maxes out at 50,000 TPS
These are not even close to the numbers that need to be achieved. And that is only one part of the story. Everyone at Radix is just focused on scalability, and even that is not enough. So why is Radix different? Because Radix is the only decentralized network where developers will be able to build quickly without the constant threat of exploits and hacks, where every improvement will get rewarded, and where scale will never be a bottleneck.
Mary Zheng | AscendEX
Last question on my end before we switch over to community q&a session — Can you please elaborate on the goals you are aiming to achieve in 2021?
Piers | Radix
This year we will launch our first mainnet, Olympia, and launch our new programming language, Scrypto, built specifically for DeFi developers. Outside of that, it is going to be a year of working closely with our community and the wider crypto community to get feedback on those first two big pieces of technology, and get ready for our Babylon launch next year when full DeFi applications and our developer royalty programs go live on the Radix mainnet.
Community Questions:
⚡Reinђαr∂ ⚡
What makes Radix unique? Why is it labelled as “DeFi done right” what do you guys mean by this and how do you differentiate from competitors? Can you list some unique features of Radix that give it a advantages over its competitors?
Piers | Radix
Sure:
1. We are developing our own DeFi programming language, Scrypto, which lets DeFi developers build quickly and safely. No other ledger to my knowledge has this.
2. We have baked developer community royalties directly into our on-ledger github like code repo to make sure developer contributions are recognised and rewarded. No other ledger to my knowledge has this.
3. We are able to linearly scale DeFi without breaking atomic composability. No other ledger to my knowledge has this.
Fırat Kara, [29.06.21 08:39]
Are there any security features that’s implemented to Radix so it may prevent hacking smart contracts exploits?
Piers | Radix
Yep, that is what the Radix Engine is for. Unlike things like the EVM which have a turing vulnerable execution model, the Radix Engine is a programmable finite state machine, the same execution system used in critical systems like nuclear control systems and stock market matching engines. It makes all execution run time both incredibly secure and incredibly fast on Radix.
Our language, Scrypto, will also help this massively, with many of the common errors that lead to hacking being caught in compile time.
ÇRYPTÖ DÜDË
What is your status regarding the audit of your smart contracts and security mechanisms to protect and assure the participants of the ecosystem?
Piers | Radix
We get all our code audited and work with several of the leading audit firms, including Quantstamp which we have an in-depth partnership with to also ensure security around all aspects of the Radix developer experience as well.
⚡Reinђαr∂ ⚡
50,000 TPS is not enough for DeFi, as you said and it needs to be able to do millions of transactions per second.
If yes Radix have solved unlimited linear scalability without breaking atomic composability, how about Radix for TPS so far?
Piers | Radix
Good question. We are releasing the network in stages. The first stage, Olympia, will do 50 transactions per second; this is to test our security model and data model before we move to the sharded system, which will substantially increase the throughput, after which we release Xi’an in 2023 which will be fully linearly scalable. This is in line with our expectation of throughput need on the Radix ledger, where 50tps will be more than sufficient at the start, but aims to follow the usual exponential growth curve over the next 10 years.
