Radix Report – 15th April 2021 | The Radix Blog

Radix Report – 15th April 2021

April 15, 2021

Overview

Piers Ridyard, CEO – Radix DLTFirst off, a huge congratulations to CoinBase with their IPO trading 55% away from listing price (after some interesting highs and lows in full crypto tradition). This is pushing crypto increasingly into the mainstream and is helping normalise crypto for business and regulators. These are all good things as they push the entire space towards mainstream acceptance and adoption.

We have the first blue chip crypto company. Think about that for a minute!Betanet is two weeks away. This means the next two weeks are going to be a flurry of activity for the team. There is a sense of focus as we are all crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s to ensure is working well.

The feeling of a project coming towards a first major release is always a mixture of excitement and trepidation. As the Radix team grows so do the number of moving parts; and with the Betanet launch coming up and mainnet not too long after that, there are a lot of things that are all coming together all at the same time.

It has been fantastic to see so many people both within Radix and outside it take ownership of key deliverables and run with them. Wallet, explorer, staking, node client, networking, consensus, state syncing and a million other small things all need to work together in harmony for even a basic public network to both work and be usable for end users.

This will be the first real test of our upcoming mainnet; while the purpose of a test is always to find any potential issues before the main release, our goal is obviously that it will all run smoothly without any issues except for the ones we create on purpose.

In the next Radix Report, I expect to be sharing the details of a successful betanet launch and seeing stories in the Radix community of people taking the first steps in using and powering a Radix network on a global scale. But for now, let’s dive into what’s been happening at Radix in the last two weeks.

Strategy & Marketing

Adam Simmons Head of Strategy – Radix DLTThe last Radix Report before betanet. That’s equally thrilling and terrifying! Everyone (especially the development team) is burning the midnight oil, as there are a lot of things that all need to be coordinated ready for launch. This is the top line of what’s been happening in my teams:

With over 330 validator proposals received for betanet, there was no shortage of enthusiastic participants. So thank you to all who applied! For betanet though, we unfortunately had to narrow down the testers. A total of 111 validators have been carefully selected to participate in testing the Radix betanet. Full information can be found here.
This isn’t the end of the road for the other potential validators - this selection is only for the temporary betanet to aid with our testing. On the Radix Olympia mainnet, validator selection is 100% open and decentralised, with validators selected by XRD holders who delegate tokens to their chosen validators. Therefore, we recommend all potential validators to remain active in the Radix community and explain why token holders should delegate to them.
Piers has been doing more ask-me-anything sessions in other crypto communities, especially in Asia. The most recent coincided with eXRD being added to the MXC exchange. Piers answered a range of questions about Radix, Cerberus and our vision in their telegram channel. If you would like to see the answers, they have been translated on our blog here.
As the team at Radix DLT has continued to grow (we’re still hiring) we have started a new regular blog series to meet the team. Each article features two of the team and gives a chance to hear in their own words more about what they do at Radix and why they joined. The latest featured Ray, a Technical Writer, and Lukasz, one of the developers. You can read the article here.
It’s not just the new team doing well, Radix DLT founder Dan recently started streaming some of his coding sessions on Twitch, and he has already made “affiliate” tier on the platform thanks to the support of the Radix community.
Our total social following has increased by 2% since the last update, however, it seems Twitter did a purge as many accounts lost a chunk of their followers on the 28th March (Radix included), so factoring in the ~700 decrease there, being net up is great! Mentions of Radix on social media are increasing, up 7.41% in the last two weeks and twitter engagement is at 3.1%, which is extremely high when looking at the platform standard of under 0.05%.
The DeFi Download podcast has had two awesome guests recently - Potion.finance and Pokt Network, make sure to give them a listen.
With more validator discussions, the Radix Discord has seen a 14.2% increase in messages sent! We’re expecting this to keep rising as we approach betanet, as discord has the benefit of many specific channels for Radix topics.
Work is well underway on the new Radix website, and the wait is nearly over. Every pixel is being polished ready for the go-live at a similar time to betanet. The new website will include some refinement of the Radix mission and messaging, and I am very excited to reveal this in the coming weeks!
If one website wasn’t enough, we are in the home stretch of the next version of the GoodFi.com website. That isn’t all on the GoodFi front though, the first advisory board meeting took place last week! Now, this is in place, once the new GoodFi site is ready, we will be announcing the new members to GoodFi and next steps there.

To end my section, I want to give a quick shoutout to the YouTube channel RadixPool! They made this video showing a time lapse visualization of Radix development over the years!

Development

April 28th is just under two weeks away, so today’s update is the last before betanet launch! As you might imagine, it’s crunch time. While we expect that we will be pushing node, wallet, and explorer revisions throughout betanet, right now we’re working to make sure that we get the most important functionality ready for the community to begin testing.A few points of interest taken from the team’s resolved items list:

Continuing to perform “chaos testing” on private testnets, including parameters such as periodic high node latency, crashed/restarted nodes, and simulated validator/staking churn
Began distributing our own node deployments across 4 regions: America, Europe, Asia, Australia
Getting close to locking the JSON-RPC web API for those (such as exchanges or third-party wallets) who need to run queries on transactions/addresses/validators, or who need a low-level method to conduct transactions programmatically
The first draft of betanet node documentation complete and in review
Node startup speed optimizations
Continuing our work on extensive storage optimizations
Transaction batching is in, allowing a single round of consensus to handle multiple individual transactions, which greatly increases throughput

Media/Community

Another 2 busy weeks in the community* and in the media. Here are some of the highlights:

The past 2 weeks have seen several strong Twitter threads that give an overview about Radix and our progress (here) and a mega thread on Cassandra (here). Those are both great reads, check them out! Give this Twitter account* a follow, this is A+ content.
Radix has been winning several Twitter polls (here and here), we haven’t seen a poll that Radix lost on Twitter, ever. Community strength level 9000.
An analysis by Santiment checks various leading indicators for crypto projects and concluded that Radix is one of the 10 fastest moving DeFi projects (here)
We have some good visibility on Reddit as well thanks to our great community (for example here)
Our awesome community member HRadvocado created another great video, an awesome time-lapse to recap the Radix journey and vision. He has now released a total of 4 excellent videos so far, here are the other 3, highly recommended: True Scalability, Cover, story and Tall buildings, solid foundation.*
The Radix Ecosystem* has partnered with Birb’s Nest. Birb’s Nest is the biggest and most credible crypto community in the English speaking space. Birb alone has over 200k Twitter followers. Lots more to come!
The Turkish Radix community* keeps growing massively. 2 weeks ago we had 2000 members, now we are at 3280 members, that’s 64% growth! Radix Community members Deniz and Emre are doing incredible work, thank you!
The Korean community* are focusing on education around the Radix tech and vision, leading to more growth (the community grew by 5% over the last 2 weeks). It is important to create solid understanding and core evangelists in each country who will then share their knowledge with the rest of the community. There has been some good development in this direction and is a focus on this for growth in May.
The Chinese community* has been a bit stagnant over the last 2 months so we are making some changes starting in May to then push full throttle ahead for the push towards Olympia release!
The Radix developer community is incredibly active, Dan is streaming on Twitch regularly, the engagement is great to see and it’s unique to have this direct view into groundbreaking innovations being developed in front of our eyes. Follow Dan’s Twitter (here) and Twitch (here) to stay up to date!