Overview

Piers Ridyard, CEO – RDX Works

First up, NFTs in Scrypto are making great progress in our Scrypto R&D labs - it is not yet live in the alpha version of the language, but progress is going great guns. Those who have already started getting their heads around Badges, Tokens, Buckets and Vaults are going to love the extra power that a generalised, flexible implementation of an NFT in Scrypto is going to bring to the table.

My personal view on NFTs is that they are likely to become one of the most important representations of value in DeFi in time. It is almost certain that almost all Real World Assets (RWAs) will be represented by NFTs, and the current separation between the NFT space and the DeFi space will continue to shrink until they become one and the same space. Art is leading the charge, but NFTs will change the world.

Outside of that awesome piece of news, it has been a pretty intense couple of weeks since the last Radix report, however, watching the incredible work the Radix community has already started doing on Scrypto has been a huge source of joy. If you are a developer and are thinking about diving into DeFi, or have got sick of battling Solidity on Ethereum, or Rust on Solana, then please head on down to our developer discord channel - you won’t regret it! https://discord.gg/QqPmH354KW

For the non-developer, if you haven’t had a chance to watch the APE Keynote video yet from our event in NYC, I highly recommend it, not only because there is some great Unreal Engine footage in it, but also because I think it helps put Scrypto in the wider industry context and why it is going to be so game changing for DeFi: https://youtu.be/Hn20w1gmpMw?t=340

Oh, and lastly, if you want to see a VERY SHINY video of my face talking about the importance of DeFi, have we got a video for you! https://youtu.be/WKoXP0c2C7Q - huge shoutout to Cryptonites and Alex at Swiss Borg for doing an incredible job here.

Strategy & Marketing

Adam Simmons, CSO - RDX Works

First up, the Alexandria Preview Event was fantastic, it was great to see so many Radvocates attend in person in NYC, but also the near 10k people who tuned in to either the live stream or the recap video and developer workshop in the last two weeks.  The response to Scrypto has been even better than expected at such an early stage - with some great comments coming out from people who have started using it. Someone in the community has also already done a first implementation of a Flash Loan function with Scrypto, one of the most sophisticated functions in DeFi!

But now onto some other highlights from the last two weeks:

• Piers did a fantastic interview with Cryptonites, talking about the future of DeFi and how Radix is the only place DeFi can thrive. This followed on from Piers taking part in the Money 2.0 Panel at the Digital Asset Summit 2021 in London and was in top form as he spoke alongside TradFi representatives!  
• The main Radix Twitter account hit another milestone - 120k! Along with the 27m impressions in November so far, this is continuing to show strong growth as more people learn about Radix and how it is a game-changer for DeFi.
• Altcoin Daily and DataDash both did great interviews and videos about Radix, which have already generated more than 163k views since their release. There has also been increased influencer attention for Radix from Crypto Twitter including ShardiB2, PostyXBT, Trader1SZ, TraderXO, Bitcointraper,Wagmisaurus, CryptoNagato, CryptoOmeaga, Crypto_birb and a host of other smaller accounts that are growing out presence online at a dramatic rate.
• To close out my section, I want to give a shout out to Mr_TMA who is doing some great work, helping and educating others about Radix while building and supporting the community. We will be in touch to send some swag your way! 

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Development

Russell Harvey, CTO & Matthew Hine, CPO - RDX Works

First off, I’ll mention the wallet update that we’ve just gotten out. This was a much-needed quality-of-life update, addressing a number of bugs, quirks, and suggestions from the community. But also, this wallet brings in-app updating on all OSes along with a handy in-app notification when there is a new wallet version waiting for you. This will be nice, as the next update to the wallet after this will switch it to the new API (with attendant benefits in load handling - see the update from last time) which you’ll want to know about as soon as it happens.

Speaking of which, an update on the new API, for those who didn’t catch it already on Discord #node-runner-announcements! 

Things are coming along nicely. In short, the current API is becoming two new APIs, one of which (Core API)  is intended for exchanges and services who want deep knowledge about ledger history. A preview form of Core API (and an updated node) went out to exchanges last week so they can begin integration work. We can’t say how long those integrations will take, but we’re providing all the support we can. The other API – the Gateway API, intended for the Radix Desktop Wallet, Explorer, and the like – we’re angling to complete by the end of year, at which point we’ll be releasing a new Wallet and migrating our archive nodes. This API will give us (and community node runners) much more ability to deal with high peak demand of Wallet users.

Progress is going well and we’re very pleased that this will be a vast improvement over our initial launch API that will carry us into the future. For developers and node-runners that want a little more detail on the new APIs (with preliminary documentation on both) so they can plan for their own migration, check here for the latest.

Lastly, of course, Scrypto is coming – with the Alexandria release happening on December 15. The feedback from developers playing around with the Scrypto preview has already been very helpful and we’re hard at work on getting everything buttoned up for a v0.1.1 initial release.

In particular, the last couple of weeks have seen significant progress on our initial implementation of NFTs as the third type of Scrypto resource after tokens and badges. We didn’t just want to toss out something weak like “here, make some supply-1 tokens” and call it a day. We know that NFT usage ranges from simple representations of art pieces, to elaborate systems of collectibles, algorithmic avatars, or breedable pets, to usages we can imagine for the future like tokenized debt positions. This means that our NFTs need to have the sort of flexible classing/metadata that have made ERC-1155 and the Flow platform popular – and they also need to have all of the wonderful asset-oriented benefits of Scrypto to make them easy and intuitive to create and interact with. We’re now playing with a couple of variations on our NFT implementation that are feeling very good as a first step, and are already beyond the NFT capabilities of other L-1s today.

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