Overview

Piers Ridyard, CEO – Radix DLT

A strong week this week with Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk sitting down to discuss their views on Bitcoin and Musk revealing SpaceX is also a Bitcoin holder. Also coming out the gates swinging,  FTX announces a $900m funding round, putting the exchange at a $18Bn valuation.

The funding of FTX is showing a further maturing in the market as the traded volume of derivatives continues to rise and FTX is pulling ahead of the pack for now with some pretty interesting technology right at the centre of their platform.

Following the rise of decentralized exchanges and their growth over the last year, it is probably going to be the next cycle rather than this that really sees decentralized derivatives as trustless DeFi products really starting to hit their stride, but the speed of maturity and sophistication of the space continues to be mind-blowing in the speed it is catching up with the traditional markets.

DeFi will eat the world of finance, slowly at first, then all at once.

On the Radix side, we are less than 1 week away from the launch of the Radix mainnet. The extra time we took to mature Instapass.io, Instabridge.io, and Ledger integrations have absolutely paid off, and the Instapass.io service went live yesterday and performed very strongly right out the gate. We see this service as a pivotal technology for a mature DeFi ecosystem and look forward to weaponizing it to help those building on the Radix platform to compete toe to toe with the large financial incumbents.

For too long compliance has served as a barrier to entry and a tool of monopolistic competition. We believe we can change that over the next couple of years and give anyone the opportunity to build incredible financial products without having to build massive legal teams to go with it.

It’s a bold goal, and we aren’t going to do it quickly, but if DeFi is going to eat the world of finance, it has to be able to eat all of it, even the complicated boring bits!

Next up, mainnet launch! Roll on the 28th of July!

Strategy & Marketing

Adam Simmons, Head of Strategy - Radix DLT

With less than a week until the Olympia Mainnet release, many of the marketing campaigns have been continuing to accelerate. Alongside this (and without meaning to jump ahead of the dev update) we have had a successful launch of the Instapass service.  Overall, things are looking very good for the Olympia launch next week, and we have some exciting things planned. But for now, let’s take a look at the last two weeks:

• The Radix Knowledge Base, Radix Learn, has had over 150 new articles added to it! Ranging from General information about Radix to DeFi & Blockchain basics, and user guides for Radix products, Radix Learn is your one-stop location for understanding more about Radix and DeFi. 
• In the past two weeks, another three influencer videos have gone live and have generated over 35,000 views already. Nicholas Merten from DataDash delivered an incredible video which is definitely one of the best influencer reviews of Radix thus far. His praise of the project and team is a huge endorsement to have. We also had videos from BK Crypto Trader and MineYour.₿iz, which you can watch at the links provided.

• Our paid Twitter campaigns are continuing to deliver excellent results at a very low average cost for the crypto space, suggesting that crypto users are engaging with Radix content at higher than average rates. These campaigns are putting us ahead of our targets for follower and social impressions ahead of the Olympia mainnet release. 
• Overall, the Radix Twitter account has seen great growth - recently hitting over 30k followers. To put this in perspective, it took 95 days to go from 20-25k, but only 51 days to go from 25k-30k followers. We have also seen our Twitter reach increase 11% in the last two weeks and hit a new milestone of over 2m impressions in the period. One highlight was the last Radix Report which alone generated nearly 1000 engagements on Twitter alone.
• The DeFi Download Podcast has had some great guests with Lorian Gabel from Figment, and Tascha Punyaneramitdee Co-Founder of Alpha Labs joining Piers on the show in the last two episodes.‍
• On the community side, we announced the updated Radvocate Program to help support the many excellent brand ambassadors and community members who are helping make the Radix vision a reality. If you or someone you know could be a good candidate for the Radvocate program, make sure to reach out!

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Development

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

Here we are once again with the last update before the mainnet launch! Without putting too fine a point on it, the extra four weeks have been just what the doctor ordered, and not just to deal with the external issues that caused us to make the tough decision to push - but also has given us the luxury of upping the level of testing and refinement. Basically what this means is less stuff that would otherwise have gone into post-launch updates.

Of course, the main headline was launching our Stokenet test network. While we only pushed this to the community late last week, we’ve actually been running Stokenet for a couple of weeks and using it to push out some rapid tweaks and bug fixes. Stokenet’s been doing very well, running notably faster than Betanet, and we’re now staking community node-runners in as validators there.  It will be a useful tool for them to get ready for mainnet and get up to speed on our pretty substantial JSON-RPC API updates.

Many of you also likely saw our update on Ledger hardware wallet support that went out just after our last Radix Report. I won’t repeat that here, but suffice to say things are going to plan: we’re in discussions with Ledger HQ to see how soon placement in their Manager as an “experimental” app might be possible, and for those who can’t wait, we’re working on a simplified set of sideloading instructions that will give the community a way to get the Radix app on their Ledger Nano S for mainnet launch with a little bit of command-line work.

Other than that, a few items from the past couple of weeks:

• Instapass had a very smooth launch, and we were happy to hear that people are finding the experience to be quick and easy.  We still have a little work to do here in order to enable validation of Ethereum addresses from a few unsupported wallet software/hardware combinations.
• Worked through a series of rapid iterations of our JSON-RPC API and the tools around it, including the addition of several informational endpoints just for node-runners, so that they can better understand how their nodes are performing.
• Gathered timings on network performance after our latest round of optimizations, so that we can properly configure our epoch lengths for mainnet, including the extra-lengthy first epoch.
• Made lots of quality of life and robustness improvements around Wallet/Ledger device interactions.

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Media & Community

As we are only days away from the Olympia mainnet launch there are many exciting things planned, stay tuned! Meanwhile here’s a quick summary of the last 2 weeks in the media and in the community:

• YouTube is heating up: A new Radix video overview published by the ‘BK Crypto Trader’ (26k followers), 3.2k views currently!  DataDash (450k followers) video already generated 32k views! An Interview with Piers and CryptoBirb will stream live today 1:30pm UTC, feel free to join! And last but not least community member Wendy made a great video about unsafe DeFi smart contracts and how Radix can help.
• Radix was mentioned by CryptoDiffer as one of the Ethereum competitors. Radix’ 18th (!) AMA on the road to Olympia with the TheGemHunters community was a big success. Meanwhile, the Radix DLT Twitter Account has hit 30k followers, congrats! 
• Important: An eXRD community liquidity mining campaign went Live on Kucoin powered by Hummingbot. Read more on how to win part of the $36.000  reward pool by providing liquidity on KuCoin.
• And finally, the eXRD Wallet Count has increased by 2.5% over the last month!

*Updates provided by members of the Radix community. May contain inaccuracies.