Overview - Piers Ridyard

Last week saw an incredibly important but subtle release for Scrypto - the Scrypto transaction model with Scrypto v0.3, which you can read about more here: https://www.radixdlt.com/post/scrypto-v0-3-released. 

However, it is SO important that in this Radix Report I’m going to have a quick shot at explaining why this is so interesting for the future of DeFi, and how clever what a seemingly small part of the system actually is.

Let me start by saying the following: “there is no such thing as a simple transaction” - all transactions in human society are complex; we just haven’t adopted systems that can elegantly express these transactions in all their complexity yet.

As a result, we think of a “payment” as a simple transaction - Alice sends Bob £5. However, what was Alice paying Bob for? Does Bob have a finite number of things he gave to Alice in return for the £5? Is this inventory tracked anywhere? Does Bob need to provide a receipt of some kind? Can Alice return the thing to Bob for a refund? Will Bob repair the thing she sold to Alice? Can Bob sell on the thing he bought, or is it only for him?

Finance and the crypto space in general often talks about “simple transactions” when discussing how much throughput a platform can perform, especially when getting into competition around how fast one platform is vs another. While Radix has a clear roadmap to huge scalability, we feel that the industry obsession with simple transactional throughput sort of misses the point.

A public ledger is a place where complex transactions can exist in all their complexity and beauty. As almost all transactions in society are actually complex exchanges. By recognising this, it starts to really open up the possibility of entirely interconnected digital economies to be fully expressed on public ledgers like Radix.

The future of Web3.0, the Metaverse, Fintech and DeFi are this rich tapestry of complexity expressed on programmable ledgers. If that is the case, a transaction model needs to be built where the transactions themselves are programmable objects that can call any number of dApps simultaneously, with fully expressive logic about what needs to happen between all of them. Only then can the full complexity of what happens every day as the result of “simple transaction” be fully brought into the digital realm.

Welcome to the Radix transaction model. It’s going to be wild.

Strategy & Marketing (Adam Simmons, CSO* & Jeremy, CMO*) 

Our Performance Marketing function is tasked with improving efficiency and effectiveness of our paid media efforts. The good news is that it is already paying off as we have seen a 1 week reduction in the cost per site visit of 62% while also reducing “leakage” (the users who are lost between clicking our ads and landing on our site) by 36%, all on a lower overall spend.

What’s happening in paid media is happening throughout our marketing team as we get more strategic about where, when, and how we allocate our resources.

You may have seen this chart, describing how we break down the various audiences of the developer world and what our research suggests is their primary motivator.

What we are now doing is further refining the audience down to a series of systematic test messages to find out what resonates.  So, for example (and these are JUST examples):

More on this (and other initiatives) to come next week. For now, enjoy my fireside chat on Radix marketing with Piers and if you want to see the result of some of our influencer outreach, check out this great video Best Blockchain Programming Language for DeFi Developers (Scrypto)

And don’t forget to tune in at 9pm GMT to watch WBO Cruiserweight Champ, Lawrence Okolie, do his ring walk wearing the Radix logo!

If you’d like to share more, join our Wen-Marketing Discord.

Development (Russell Harvey, CTO* & Matthew Hine, CPO*)

Matt and Russ are locked away at an offsite with the Scrypto/REv2 team doing Big Think on some design items and working out the roadmap to Babylon, so the dev update will be a short one this week.

The big news is that Scrypto v0.3 released, bringing with it our new transaction layer and account model, and demonstrating how atomic composability will be part of every Babylon transaction.

A new version of the Network Gateway released on Feb 21, adding some additional endpoints which were requested by our node-runner community.

Finally, four Foundation validator nodes were unregistered and shut down in response to the strong performance of the node-runner community, freeing up additional slots in the validator set and reducing RTJLs network stake.

Update from the Radix Community**

• A new community website is under construction, expected to release v1 in mid March, with the goal of making a low friction entry point for newcomers to understand Radix’s potential, and explore the Radix ecosystem more easily. A new brand mark and the start of a visual identity was designed by a community member. We’ll be using this theme on the new site as well as on promotional assets for the web and for in person events. We hope you like it. 
  

Some news from global communities: 

• Our friend Kripto Emre mentioned Radix in his latest video and it was viewed more than 30k! The Indonesian community had their first round of t-shirt giveaway to the most active community members. Check out Radix followers with their Radix t-shirts! Don’t worry if you haven’t had your Radix t-shirts yet, Japan, China, Korea and Turkey you are up next! Some awesome infographics on Radix’s 1 Million TSP achievement and the early story of Cerberus were shared with the Indonesian community. A retired professor in Korea explained Radix in his video and led many people to dive into the rabbit hole of Radix technology. Thank you Professor Nick! The CMO of RDX Works has greeted the Radix Japanese community, see his video here and we all need to admit he speaks very good Japanese! 
• Our dear partner Cryptobirb shared the news of RDX Works sponsoring Lawrence Okolie. 
• A huge shoutout to Hakan Atabas - a member of the Radix Turkish Community- for translating the Cerberus whitepaper in Turkish, thank you very much!
  

*The Radix Report update comes from team members at RDX Works Ltd

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