Overview

Piers Ridyard, CEO – Radix DLT

The watchword for this week is Volcanoes. For those who missed it, El Salvador has now approved Bitcoin to become legal tender and the President of El Salvador has pledged a thermal electric company based in a volcano to start Bitcoin mining operations. 

Not only this, the Chinese government has started shutting down all the coal dependent mining operations in China, but so far leaving the ones using renewable energy. The use of Bitcoin mining to use waste electricity at renewable energy sites globally is shaping up to be an interesting case study in whether Proof of Work really can be made green.

On the subject of green security - Radix staking is shortly going live on the betanet. Unlike Bitcoin and (currently) Ethereum, Radix uses Proof of Stake to secure the network, which has super low energy usage compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum and is one of the greenest ways to secure a decentralized public network. We will be energy efficient from day 1 - how else can you create a network for the global financial system to run on?!

If you are not yet using the Radix Betanet, please do get ready to download the new wallet and try out our staking ready for mainnet - this is where the fun really kicks off with 300m XRD annually being available to earn for staking on the Radix Mainnet. At current prices ($0.10 per eXRD) that is likely to be over $30m worth of XRD being earned every year by people staking.

$30,000,000. Yep.

If you would like to earn a piece of that, it will be super simple. All you need to do is stake at least 100 XRD from your Radix Desktop Wallet when mainnet goes live. That’s it.

If you want to go all in, you could even run a node on the mainnet - more details of how to do that will be released very soon!

Strategy & Marketing

Adam Simmons, Head of Strategy - Radix DLT

It’s always a joy when we can finally talk about the exciting things we have been working on and the potential they hold for Radix. So, let’s kick off with the big news.

While many of you may have been expecting it, the confirmation of the Radix Olympia Mainnet coming on June 30th officially kicked off the ramp-up in activity ready for mainnet. There is a lot more coming in terms of details and updates for mainnet, so make sure to stay tuned to the official Radix channels. 

The other major news is the announcement of Instapass and Instabridge. While initially these will be one of the routes available for converting eXRD to XRD (and back again), there is a world of opportunity presented by these products. Instapass especially will give the Radix ecosystem a huge advantage by enabling developers to integrate with this single sign-on solution for compliance - opening up a whole new realm of compliant DeFi applications. 

Alongside the big news, here are a few other highlights of the last two weeks:

• The Radix Telegram has grown significantly recently, and is about to hit 12k members, up 3.9% over the previous two weeks. This is in part thanks to the whirlwind of AMAs Piers has been doing in different communities and groups that have seen high levels of engagement and interest in Radix.
• In the last month, Discord has continued to be a key channel for the Radix community, with engagement showing strong growth. Visitors are up 12.2%, active communicators have increased by 10%, and total messages sent is 56% up compared to the previous month. 
• The latest “meet the team” blog went live featuring two of the Radix DLT development team, Alex & Michal. Make sure to take a read here.
• The Radix Twitter has seen a 9.2% increase in mentions (up 54% vs May!), with the Olympia announcement generating nearly 20k impressions and over 1100 engagements already. In total, the last 11 days have generated 225k impressions with an excellent engagement rate of 3.4%. 
• The Radix Blockfolio Signals have been gaining traction, with over 3000 followers and the latest update about Olympia generating a click through rate of 8.93%.
• Finally, Radix tokens holders hit a new milestone of 8600 today, up 2% since the start of June.

Development

Russell Harvey, CTO & Matthew Hine, Head of Product - Radix DLT

The heads-down, nose-to-the-grindstone, brass-tacks, and various other forms of hard work continue as we wake up each morning with mainnet on our minds.

Probably the most exciting update is the new betanet Desktop Wallet that we will be releasing very shortly – now with staking and unstaking enabled for your testing pleasure! To complement, we are also putting up a new version of the betanet Explorer that includes a list of current validators for you to use. Go crazy staking as much or as little to any validators you want; let’s make sure we test this thoroughly! We hope it gives you a good idea how easy staking will be on the mainnet. Keep in mind that on betanet, the unstaking delay is set to be zero to speed up testing, but this will change on mainnet. 

Other than that, some more behind-the-scenes items from the team:

• We released Beta3 of the Node. In addition to general bug fixes and enhancements™, this one includes a couple of goodies for the node-runner folks. First, there is now a much more streamlined installation and upgrade flow via a brand new CLI (command line interface) tool. Using that CLI tool, you can now also install a great little visual dashboard that will help node-runners see what their node is doing real time. Here’s a snapshot:

• Beta3 also marks the beginning of betanet network emissions.  Once we’ve released the new wallet with staking and you stake to some nodes, if you watch your stakes carefully, you’ll notice that the numbers go up each epoch as your rewards are automatically restaked.
• We’ve been continuing to work on updates to the JSON-RPC APIs to incorporate feedback from the community and generally provide a more clear interface to node features, such as APIs that more closely align to full/archive/validator node types, and a new “/health” endpoint that provides concise node operation status. We need to sync the release of this API with a new version of the Wallet, so it didn’t happen this week, but expect that fairly soon.
• Another coming-soon update is a move to encrypted P2P communication between nodes.

Media/Community

Another 2 weeks in the media/community have passed.

We have been very active behind the scenes to line up some strategic moves for the Radix mainnet and beyond. Publicly it was a bit of a quiet period after the big GoodFi and Radix announcement, and before we ramp up the activity for the long-awaited Radix Mainnet launch at the end of June. Here are some of the highlights of the last 2 weeks:

• 8 AMAs in March, another 8 AMAs planned for June. We are currently reviewing the impact of the AMAs to decide on which groups are worth revisiting in the future
• Our community partnership with the Birb Nest has generated over 670k impression in May alone
• Radix thread in r/Ethereum with good visibility 
• EXRD was trending on Coingecko