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Despite a turbulent 12 months for the wider industry and the world, 2022 was pivotal in shaping the future success of the Radix Network. Throughout, the RDX Works team remained singularly focused on creating a radically better financial system.
As the team marches toward the Babylon milestone, let's take a moment to reflect on the past 12 months and have a quick overview of what to expect in 2023.
Building Tomorrow’s Web3
Product and Development
2022 was all about taking the planned Babylon network upgrade from a set of concepts on a whiteboard to concrete designs, working implementations, and a coordinated release date. Some highlights:
- Three public test network releases were successfully delivered on schedule with the Public Test Environment, Babylon Alphanet and Babylon Betanet.
- Scrypto progressed far more rapidly and capably than anyone anticipated and the developer community has resoundingly responded, with over 4,500 unique clones of the GitHub repo and an outpouring of effusive praise for the language.
- Radix Engine v2 today is practically unrecognizable when compared to what it looked like at its inception a year ago. The introduction of the transaction manifest, unified authorization model, and even more powerful native assets will redefine the crypto user and developer experience, allowing for levels of safety and control that simply aren’t achievable on any other network.
- Instabridge is well into a ground-up rewrite and is shaping up for a preview release on Olympia.
- The death of the seed phrase was finally made practical with the development of Babylon’s decentralized account recovery model.
- After a mind-boggling amount of design, skull sweat, and user testing, the curtain was finally rolled back on a paradigm-changing vision for a wallet experience at RadFi.
- Russell Harvey, CTO @ RDX Works
The Radix Developer Ecosystem
2022 was an unforgettable year for Radix's developer ecosystem and the Developer Ecosystem team. Radix's growing community of Scrypto developers began creating their own dApps and building their first blueprints, resulting in many innovative projects starting to shape the early foundations of a thriving Web3 ecosystem. Scrypto challenges throughout the year enabled community members to showcase the radically different ways they could leverage Scrypto, with impressive results ranging from DEXs to Oracles and NFTs. If you'd like to learn more about the projects on Radix, head to the Radix Ecosystem Metrics Page – built by Radix community member Nelly Sayon.
Scrypto workshops – including a hackathon at RedFoo's Party Rock Mansion and in cities such as Prague, Amsterdam, and Lisbon – enabled hundreds of like-minded developers worldwide to meet, network, and collaborate, resulting in further growth of the ecosystem and more fantastic projects being built on the network. Over 1,600 attendees joined the events in total.
Towards the end of the year, the team launched the beta version of the Scrypto 101 course (which had more than 100 user sign-ups), along with the launch of the first-ever Radix Grants Program. Both of these steps marked a significant move towards the next phase of RDX Works' committed efforts to support the Radix developer ecosystem and will play a major role in its growth this year.
In addition to wider community growth, community members showed incredible personal growth, with developers like Peter Kim going from Scrypto-newbie to challenge winner and Austin taking the lead of Radix's Scrypto class of 2022.
With the developer community thriving, the team is excited to see more pioneers join the mission and build incredible dApps on Radix in 2023.
- Maëlle Baud, Head of Developer Ecosystem @ RDX Works
Paving the Way for a Radically Better Future
Marketing & Strategy
Over the course of 2022, we built a strong marketing team, marketing operations muscle, and powerful campaign capabilities.
In January, we started with three people. Since then, we've invested in content marketing, event marketing, community marketing, PR, performance marketing, influencer marketing, and marketing operations. Our team now numbers 12, and we are building a culture of excellence to make the Radix brand one of the standout brands in the L1 space.
The initial capability we wanted to build was the "ground game," enabling our community of Radvocates to effectively evangelize all of the things that make our vision and solution unique. We built out a programmatic meetup function, resulting in 50 meetups in 20 countries around the world, helping nearly 1,000 people experience the "Radix Revelation." We also launched the Dandelion marketing program to help further empower visionary community members with the funds they need to experiment with innovative marketing ideas, including the Radix Ecosystem Metrics page. Finally, we created one of the most robust university relations programs in crypto, with numerous connections to top-tier blockchain clubs at places like Cambridge, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, and Purdue.
Next, we wanted to build our focused campaign capability, preparing us for our big effort on the road to Babylon. This we did over the summer, culminating at the end of September with Operation Sparta. This concentrated awareness effort generated 1.3 mm impressions, 27 PR articles, 697K Post views, and significant positive movement across every area we track. This set us up for a big push for RadFi in December.
With #RadFi2022, the marketing team ended the year with a bang. With over 40,000 views in the first 24 hours, and more than 25,000 tweets driving Radix into a trending spot on crypto Twitter the following week, the phenomenal turnout for Radix's first-ever 'unveiling' was a refreshing reminder that our message can and does resonate with people suffering from horrific DeFi experiences, looking for a new leader to make the vision of DeFi a reality.
By the time the year came to a close, we had accumulated over 100 press mentions, highlights, and articles on Radix across top-tier and industry-leading publications like The Washington Post, Entrepreneur, and CoinTelegraph (to name a few), established strong industry relationships with people like Ivan on Tech, had a powerful presence at Consensus, CES, WebSummit, Token2049, and Messari Mainnet (among others) and dramatically improved the way we operate as a team, setting us up for 2023 success.
We always are happy to receive questions/comments/ideas in our Wen-Marketing Discord, and we are grateful for your support.
- Jeremy Epstein, CMO @ RDX Works
The Radix Community
After more than nine years of practice, the Radix Community has become exceedingly good at weathering the bear market storms and coming out stronger than ever.
Last year saw an explosion in Radix community projects. No longer are members confined to the main Radix channels; there is now a plethora of haunts to explore and spend time in. NFTs are flourishing, and cDEXs have become a thing. Whether you're repping that #Scroplife or joining DogeCube or Ociswap for an event, there is a constant stream of things to do and positive updates flowing from ecosystem projects.
In 2022, as Jeremy mentions above, there were over 50 community meetups across 20 countries and more than 1000 attendees. Radix Ambassadors were unleashed and assisted with events, partnerships, analyst relations, and community building. Meanwhile, Radix community Twitter accounts have really hit their stride, along with Radix's own Twitter page, which surpassed the 200k follower mark by the end of the year.
2023 is a pivotal year for the Radix community. The release of Babylon is gasoline on an already raging fire. With DeFi live on Radix, the community will rapidly expand, bringing new opportunities, new challenges, and a wave of excitement for all involved. If you have been on the sidelines, now is the time to dive in head first.
Thank you to everyone who helps make the Radix community #Top1Minimum.
- Jacob McAtamney, head of Community @ RDX Works
Operations & Team Growth
During 2022, the team at RDX Works scaled impressively, with 72 people recruited across the business, the year ended with a total headcount of 102 across 24 countries. Over the year, team growth strengthened multiple areas of the business beyond tech, including a solid back office function covering operational risk, cyber security, people, and finance operations.
Increasing diversity and inclusion was a core focus in 2022, with the hiring of more women and workers with different ages, ethnicities, sexual orientation, and socio-economic backgrounds across the business helping to close the inclusion gap overall. This will continue to be a focus for us in 2023.
In 2023, the team plans to put a strong focus on the continued well-being of all of its members in the run-up to the release of Babylon, with increasing investments into mental health resources and further learning and development for all workers to ensure everyone feels confident, happy, and set up to succeed in their roles.
- Farrah Ather, Head of People @ RDX Works
The March To Babylon & Beyond
A message from the CEO, Piers Ridyard
For Radix, 2022 was a year focused on building the developer community and driving momentum around Scrypto. It went from the team at RDX Works theorizing what is necessary for the next generation of DeFi, to delivering the first pieces that will be critical components for DeFi to go mainstream.
With Scrypto becoming available for the community to test, the network saw some fantastic projects emerge, including the launch of the first Radix DEXs, like OciSwap and CaviarSwap, which today would be ranked around fourth or fifth in the Cardano or Near ecosystem by volume… All before there’s even a public network live on Radix.
Another huge milestone was the maturing of Radix’s communication and how it saw its purpose in the world. The team ended the year with RadFi, which was the last puzzle piece bringing together the entire vision for a fully functional developer tool set and a platform that will enable people to build and grow sophisticated dApps.
If you have not watched RadFi yet, watch it right now, it is awesome:
2022 also revealed the problems represented by centralized players in the space and how they sit between a user and the assets that they want to own. The entire purpose of crypto was self-sovereignty and the ability to directly control your assets. However, the useability limitations that hold back much of DeFi today resulted in a rise of centralized financial products that ultimately blew up while DeFi continued to work just as it had been programmed to. One of the best things about the full Radix stack launching this year will be its ability to give back user sovereignty while enabling a high-quality, easily accessible, and safe user experience that is yet to be seen in DeFi.
2023 will be a tumultuous year for crypto and the markets in general. This year is likely to see more real-world assets come to public ledgers, along with more institutional players starting to deploy on top of public ledgers. Experiments of this – like that of JP Morgan and the Monetary Authority of Singapore executing their first DeFi trade on a public ledger, or MakerDAO investing in Real World Assets – have already started paving the way for this huge step forward and give some insight into what might play out over the next 12 months for the wider industry.
At the same time, Radix will go live with Babylon in Q2 this year. That will be a huge milestone for Radix and one I’m incredibly excited about. Along with emerging tech and experimentation in the space, the overlap with real-world assets and financial institutions, and incredible user experience and developer experience gains that the Radix Stack provides, I am sure that the next wave of DeFi is going to be huge.
On top of Babylon this year, many of the dApps built on the Radix network will start leveling up, with Scrypto’s competitive advantage becoming more apparent through the increasing innovation in dApps already being built on the Radix test networks. I am so excited to see what the Radix community will launch when they can finally launch apps on the live network.
This year will be huge for Radix and the Radix community, as well as the Radix UX innovations really starting to lay the groundwork for DeFi to make inroads to mainstream users. Just remember, crypto is inevitable, it is now just a question of when and how.
- Piers Ridyard, CEO @ RDX Works