Overview

Piers Ridyard, CEO – Radix DLT

With only three weeks to go before the world gets its first look at Scrypto, we are giving away three Lamborghinis to celebrate! More details below…

If you haven’t already had the chance to read Matt’s excellent blog series to understand why Scrypto is going to be such a game-changer for the DeFi industry, here they are again:

The problem with smart contracts today

Radix Engine v2: Adding superpowers to layer 1s

Scrypto: a new paradigm in programming DeFi

With this many issues with Solidity and the EVM, it is kind of mind-blowing how far the DeFi industry has been able to come in the first place. 

That was really forced home in our most recent internal Scrypto Hackathon and the final prep for APE Radix! If you haven’t registered yet, here is the good stuff: https://go.radixdlt.com/APE-RSVP

Lastly, I would like to stop and take a moment to give a huge shoutout to the Radix node runner community - not only are we now over $250m in staked tokens, they have also been busy at work building some really awesome dashboards for the network - 100% community built and I love them all!

Here are the first three you should be checking out:

https://www.radixdashboard.com 

https://florianpieperstaking.com/validators

https://www.radixscan.io/

If you like them, keep them in your Radix user flow, and I am sure they will be adding more features soon!

More to come in the next report ❤️❤️❤️

Strategy & Marketing

Adam Simmons, CSO - Radix DLT

The whole marketing team is in full swing for the Alexandria launch. There are three distinct phases to the launch: the lead up to the APE event, where we are primarily sharing content around the product vision of Scrypto and how it will be a game-changer for building DeFi; Post APE is where people will have the first hands-on with a super early version of Scrypto code, so we will see examples and case studies with excitement building; and finally, post-Alexandria launch, which is the start of main marketing for developers as it’s when people can actually get started and the main activity will be kicking off in January. 

Of course, this planning doesn’t stop the marketing machine from driving forward, so let’s look at the last two weeks!

• In the last two weeks, the big achievement is that total XRD staked is now up to 25% of circulating supply! This is a significant milestone and brings it close to $300m of XRD staked. This is fantastic not only for network security but also for confidence in the wider market regarding the prospects for Radix long term. Thank you to all of the token holders staking, and especially to all the fantastic validator nodes providing such a great selection of options.
• As part of our promotion of leading up to APE, the first of a batch of influencer videos went live with an Altcoin Daily video that has already received over 63k views (and over 460k views on the tweet about it), and great feedback from both the Radix community and wider industry. The video going live also saw a spike in web traffic and new joiners to the community channels, so we are excited to see more from that!
• Radix DLT will be exhibiting at Web Summit 2021 (Pavillion 1, E154!) from November 1-4th. We have a booth, some excellent ad space, and will also be giving away 3 Lamborghinis (Lego ones!) More details here. Web Summit is a major event and will be a fantastic opportunity to raise the profile of Radix with a broader audience of potential developers, users, investors, and media!

• After the success of the September Radix Roundtable, where Piers, Matt, Russell, and myself (Adam) sit down to talk high-level about Radix, we have just released the October edition here.
• A video of the panel Piers moderated at Token 2049 is also now available here. It was an amazing discussion about scaling blockchains towards mass adoption with speakers including Eli Ben-Sasson - Co-Founder, Starkware, Emin Gun Sirer - CEO, Ava Labs, Evan Shapiro - CEO, Mina Foundation, Stan Kladko - Co-Founder and CTO, SKALE Labs, and of course our own Piers Ridyard - CEO, Radix DLT.
• To end my section, I want to shout out the fantastic work of two groups in the Radix community. Firstly, Miso_Shiru69, who has been making some fantastic memes and sharing them far and wide (such as the one below), and also the people behind the Doge3 community who have been engaging in some intense meme brawls with rival dog coins! The Doge3 community has grown considerably thanks to their efforts!

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

Amidst ongoing development work, the last two weeks included an actual in-person gathering of Radix - full tech team and all! We’ve been growing furiously, and this was a great chance for us to get to know each other as well as rapidly get the team up to speed on all things Radix, Matrix-jack-into-spine style.

The tech team made full use of the face-to-face time. We had some excellent design discussions around items we know are coming down the pike for implementation: “sentry node” architecture options and the sorts of attacks they can prevent, options for more efficient node state syncing, a little discussion on the always-exciting topic of Merkle trees, further automated test architectures, and of course consideration of various methods and tradeoffs for slashing implementation.

We also took a day for a Scrypto DeFi dApp hackathon (with a very rough Alexandria version). This was a highlight of the week. We’re continuing to get a good feel for the benefits of Scrypto, refining it as we apply it to real-world use cases, and creating example code that we can use to get our developer community up to speed. Stay tuned for the Alexandria Preview Event on Nov. 12!

Then on to some selected items of dev team progress:

• The biggest item has been progressing on our implementation of the upcoming new API update.  At its core, the update is about providing a single stream of raw events from the node, and then properly separating the concern of organizing and exposing that information to another service.  More details to come on this, including an explanation of how this impacts the concept of an archive node.
• The team continues to put Scrypto through its paces, recreating existing classes of DeFi apps and thinking about how we can make common patterns feel natural and first-class.  We’re hard at work on our messaging and examples for APE.
• We have concretely identified and fixed a bug that was contributing to the nefarious & mysterious “missed proposal” node-runner issue that has had us scratching our heads for a very long time.  At this point, we aren’t certain that we have removed all possible causes, but we have at least driven it sufficiently far underground that we can no longer reproduce it in-house.  After some more testing, we’ll be coordinating a new node release.

Media & Community

• The Radix Council started planning the “Radix Takeover in Major Cities around the Globe” - stay tuned for the details! Don’t forget to follow Radix Council’s new Twitter account! 
• Community initiatives have seen several posts on Reddit reach over 1013 upvotes on different subreddits! Here is our post on Cryptomoonshot subreddit,
• Our friend Cryptobirb is also thrilled with the news of the Alexandria Preview Event! His latest tweet has reached 29.8k views! Make sure to like, comment and RT! 
• The international communities are doing great. Active users in Indonesia increased 13.32%, and 286 new users in the Group compared to last month with 75% of users enabled notification on our local TG channel: https://t.me/channelradixindonesia
• The Radix community proudly presents the GoodFi panel hosted by Radix, Terra, Bancor, and SushiSwap and moderated by Maker DAO! The event went live on October 13th on various channels, mainly in China, Korea, and Japan. The view for the panel discussion video is growing day by day. Watch the panel with Korean, Japanese, and Chinese subtitles.

• All the top-tier Japanese media (CoinPost, CoinTelegraph, and CryptoTimes) have made an announcement about GoodFi event along with nine big influencers in Japan.  
• The top-tier Korean media TokenPost and Coinreaders have made an announcement about the event.
• The Chinese WeChat community number grew about 10-15% compared to the previous month.

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