Overview

Piers Ridyard, CEO – Radix DLT

This week brought some good crypto news with Paypal now letting people withdraw Bitcoin they have bought from Paypal. Previously you could only buy/hold/sell entirely within the Paypal walled garden. Buying crypto is a huge barrier to entry for many people around, and this just brings us that one step closer to mainstream adoption not only being possible, but unstoppable.

In addition, Apple is moving their juggernaut eye towards at least considering crypto as worth integrating. However, this might be a case of dream on little dreamer -  they have been hiring VR and automotive design engineers for more than half a decade and we still haven’t seen that technology out of the big white fruit maker - but I am long term bullish. Web 3.0 functionality baked directly into a mobile OS will be inevitable, but there are still some usability wrinkles in DeFi/crypto to get out first! 

On the Radix side, the Betanet testing continues to do everything it is supposed to for the development team, which has been both busy and happy with all of the different ways in which you guys are stress testing the network both accidentally and on purpose - Russ will cover this more in his section, but we are very happy with how it is going and just wanted to give a huge shout out to everyone in the discord community that has been posting bug reports and giving feedback on everything from the wallet UX to the node runner software.

It is this process that creates great products. This is where the real work of making a product for the world to build on truly starts.

Strategy & Marketing

Adam Simmons, Head of Strategy - Radix DLT

The last two weeks have been busy for the Strategy & Marketing teams, with highlights including:

• GoodFi, the non-profit founded by Radix with the mission to get 100m people into DeFi by 2025 had some big news - 23 senior executives from leading DeFi projects including SushiSwap, Chainlink, Aave, Avalanche, and mStable have joined the advisory board. The full announcement can be found here. 
• In addition to the advisory board, the initial iteration of goodfi.com is now live, introducing new users to DeFi and helping them take the first step of getting a wallet and assets! This is just the start of what is planned for goodfi.com, with work already underway on a big next step!
• Unsurprisingly, the addition of leading DeFi projects to GoodFi put Radix in the news. The total coverage is estimated at over 200k impressions on major outlets such as Cointelegraph, Investing.com, Yahoo, Coinspeaker, and more!
• The Radix DLT  team is pleased to add Emre as our new Marketing Director. With over ten years of business and marketing experience, Emre is in charge of expanding the global reach of the Radix brand and driving growth for its community. Prior to joining Radix, Emre was the Marketing Director for Energi Core, which gives him a unique level of insight into the marketing needs of the project.
• Piers featured twice on the CryptoBirb Livestream to talk about how to 100x DeFi and again on leading a panel alongside GoodFi members Sushiswap, Aave, Avalanche and Stakerdao discussing making DeFi mainstream.
• We hit new milestones with our marketing channels - 25k followers on Twitter and 10k members on the Radix Discord. It’s not just more followers though, it’s more engagement! In the last 15 days, Twitter engagement is up 46.5% and mentions are up 72%. This wouldn’t be possible without the great support from the community, so thank you.
• There are now over 8,400 token holders, showing steady growth towards the 10k milestone.
• The Radix DeFi Download Podcast has had some phenomenal guests in the last two weeks. First up was Do Kwon, the CEO at Terra joining Piers to discuss the future of finance. The following week Piers was joined by crypto marketing extraordinaire Jeremy Epstein who chatted about tribalism in crypto, his work with Radix, and even a briefing to the Pentagon. These episodes are on your favourite podcast apps as well as the Radix YouTube channel.
• To finish off my section with some fun news - the first Radix Swag competition is currently live. We have noticed the great creativity from the Radix community and therefore are offering 7,700 eXRD in prizes for designing a t-shirt or hoodie for the new Radix Merch store. There are already some great entries, and you get see the full details here.
  

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Development

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

Betanet tech update number two! It feels like it's been much more than a mere month since betanet launch, given the furious pace of activity within the team. I'll say once again that even if the testing isn't immediately obvious, the value of a real, live, 24/7 network is immense. For example, we have been silently pushing updates to our own validator nodes to do everything from testing out stability improvements to reductions in hardware requirements – all while our community betanet node runners experiment with their own configurations. Even things like how we deploy and document the node for mainnet are being built out much more effectively with the input and engagement of an open community. And of course the ongoing wallet and explorer bug reports continue to be captured and prioritized as we look ahead – thank you!

Some particular items from the last two weeks:

• Yulong Wu joined us a few weeks ago and he has jumped headlong into the Radix Engine v2 and Scrypto concepts. It's very exciting to have somebody with his strong background making active progress here while the majority of the team focuses day-to-day on Olympia mainnet delivery.
• In the Desktop Wallet, we knocked off a short list of the most impactful user experience bugs and have been working on enabling (and testing) staking. To go along with this is enabling some new bits in the Explorer, such as viewing the validator list and looking up information on individual validator nodes. We're working to get these out into your hands as soon as we can.
• On the Node side, we pushed out a beta 2 release which addressed some memory leak issues discovered by the community, as well as a handful of less visible enhancements. This ended up being a fantastic test of network stability, as some nodes were intermittently going offline; and we were pleased to see that even under fairly adverse conditions, the network kept ticking along just as it was designed to do.
• The beta 2 node update also created another great test in the form of a change in networking that, while not dramatic, created a break in backwards compatibility. Normally this is the kind of update that would be carefully pre-announced and coordinated with the community, but on betanet we had the ability to roll it out immediately on our own nodes and watch how the network behaved as the community brought their updated nodes back online over a few days. Again, even under challenging conditions that we wouldn't expect on the real mainnet, the protocol did all the right things to keep the network running reliably.
• We've got some nice stuff queued up for beta 3 – but I won't give that away here. You'll have to stay tuned for our next update!

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Media/Community

Another two weeks have passed in the media and community. Here are the highlights:

Very strong coverage of the news around Radix’s GoodFi Alliance:

• GoodFi coalition adds 22 industry leaders to help attract 100M to DeFi (Cointelegraph)
• Non-Profit GoodFi Announces Prominent Advisory Board to Help Bring 100 Million People into DeFi (Blocktelegraph)
• GoodFi Advisory Board Attracts Executives From 22 Top DeFi Projects (Coinspeaker)
• GoodFi’s Newly Announced Advisory Board Takes Center Stage in DeFi (CoinAnnouncer)
• GoodFi Announces Advisory Board With 22 Executives From Top DeFi Project (Benzinga)
• Demystifying DeFi: GoodFi announces new advisory board, launches educational website (CryptoDaily)
• Chainlink, SushiSwap execs join non-profit GoodFi to bring 'DeFi to 100 million people' (CryptoSlate)
• GoodFi Releases New Website and Advisory Board With Executives from Chainlink, Radix, Aave, Sushiswap and more (Investing.com and BTC Peers)
• GoodFi Releases New Website and Advisory Board With 22 of the Brightest DeFi Minds (Bitcoinist.com)
• GoodFi Advisory Board Attracts 22 Executives from Chainlink, Aave, Radix, mStable and Other Leading DeFi Projects (NewsBTC)

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As previously mentioned we are targeting 15-20 AMAs in key crypto communities in May and June. 6 of these are now done (Casperdefi, Defiracoons, Gemchasers, CryptoNesiaGlobal, Crypto_Talks, Cryptodonationamagroup).

Ahead of mainnet we have several additional marketing initiatives planned, so stay tuned!