Overview
Piers Ridyard, CEO – Radix DLT
As ever in crypto, the days are long, and the weeks are short. There is a lot to cover in this Radix Report, so I shall keep this section brief!
In addition to the top-secret dev team meeting (at least until you read about it in the dev update below), the Radix strategy team also assembled for an intense week of planning for the lead-up to Alexandria, as well as early thinking on the journey to Babylon next year.
I’ll leave it to the team lead to give the top-level details, but everyone at Radix is extremely excited about what is coming in our roadmap and how it will shape the future of global finance.
The last two weeks have also been host to some great community discussions, with many focused on considering a potential change to the unlocking of Radix Tokens. With nearly 20,000 messages in the Radix Discord, the whole team has been listening to the various opinions. With the first community survey on the change showing 66.8% of participants being in favor of unlocking the tokens, we are now conducting the second, token-weighted survey.
What we have already seen is the high level of enthusiasm from the whole community around these emotive topics, and we are already putting in place new processes to ensure that everyone helping drive Radix forward not only feels like a true Radvocate but knows that the team is listening and engaging in ways that help us all work together to achieve the Radix vision.
Strategy & Marketing
Adam Simmons, Head of Strategy - Radix DLT
The marketing team at Radix closed out the month STRONG. Therefore, I’m going to let the numbers do the talking:
- The Radix Twitter account is just shy of 70,000 followers. To put this in perspective, at the end of July it was at 34,000. It’s over doubled in a month thanks to the large awareness campaigns we have been running around the Olympia mainnet launch and great interaction from the community.
- Twitter also had its most successful month EVER for Radix - over 100M views on our tweets, with an average of 4.4M per day in the last two weeks. This is a phenomenal achievement and shows how much attention Radix has been getting with the mainnet launch and staking emissions starting.
- In addition to great reach on Twitter, engagement has grown as well. Back in May, we averaged 157 likes and 71 retweets per day - fast forward to August, and that was 577 likes per day (+267%) and 214 retweets (+201%).
- We’ve updated the radxdlt.com homepage with some new messaging about how Radix will 10x developer productivity, provide 100x more DeFi security, and bring 1000x more scalability than any other blockchain or DLT. This strong statement marks the next stage in our messaging evolution, and is a testament to our goal to be the future home of the $360Tn global finance system!
- Swag.radixdlt.com will have a new item on Friday 10th September, fresh from the design competition. As with the last competition, this will be a limited edition so be ready to snatch it up fast!
- In the community channels, we saw over 23,000 messages sent on Discord (up 284%) with great discussions on the unlocking-debate channel. Over on telegram, we saw active users increase 10% and continued in-depth discussions from both Radvocates and new members joining.
- To round it out, XRD staking has continued to increase, with over 871,000,000 XRD staked. That is over 45% of the circulating supply now staked. Not only is this a high level of staking, but we have seen this split well across a range of community validators that are performant and geographically diverse. This is great for the decentralization, reliability, and stability of the Radix Public Network!
Development
Russell Harvey, CTO & Matthew Hine, Head of Product - Radix DLT
At the time of the last Radix Report, key members of the dev team had just entered seclusion at an undisclosed location in the UK. The subject: Scrypto and Radix Engine v2. The task: Combine months of research into smart contract languages and virtual machine architectures, study of real-world DeFi use cases and barriers to success, prototyping and testing with select Radix community developers (you know who you are - thank you!), and our strongly-held belief in the advantages of an asset-oriented approach to finance on public ledger networks.
In short, this was our chance to fully move Alexandria from research and product discovery into implementation with confidence in our direction.
The results couldn't be more exciting. After fleshing out our implementation plan (and even compiling and running a little Scrypto code with a very alpha REv2), we remain confident in an Alexandria release by year's end that will give developers their first taste of a dApp development experience designed specifically for powerful and secure DeFi. Alexandria will include a working Scrypto compiler, with the ability to run code through a locally-run early version of Radix Engine v2 (without the complexity of a network or ledger). This will give developers useful "early access" to building dApps with Scrypto and get a feeling of how those dApps will operate if deployed on a live network. Developers who get started on this local Alexandria environment will be in the best position to deploy the very first dApps when Scrypto and Radix Engine v2 move to the Radix Public Network at its Babylon release next year.
We have a series of blogs planned leading up to the release of Alexandria to paint a complete picture of why Scrypto matters, how Scrypto development will work, and what we expect the road from Alexandria to Babylon next year to look like. The wait is almost over, and we can't wait to dig in with our early developer community.
To those developers, Alexandria is all about you. The things you begin to build with Scrypto will light the lighthouse that will show other passionate builders just what is possible with a better kind of smart contract. That's how we cut through the hype of "Ethereum killer" platforms that aren't focused on what matters for real developers, and start creating a future of finance rich in opportunities for anyone with great ideas.
Media & Community
Twitter: The Radix community has been instrumental in the growth of the official Radix Twitter account, helping to drive engagement and attract followers as we reach 70,000 followers! Thank you again to the army of Radvocates liking, retweeting, and commenting on posts, you’re a huge asset to Radix!
GoodFi: Since the release of the GoodFi Matchmaker service, Radix has been covered widely in the media alongside new members Polygon, Terra, Bancor and The Graph! Coverage by Yahoo Finance, Coinspeaker, Investing.com, BTC Manager, News BTC, Benzinga, Bitcoinist, Tech Bullion, Coin Quora and BlockTelegraph.
Turkish Community: The total messages in the Turkish telegram channel have surged by 37% compared to the last report and we have seen 401 new members within the last two weeks! Our good friend Kripto Emre analyzed Radix in his latest videos and the total views reached 69k!
Indonesian Community: Community group members increased to 1707 members. This went along with increased activity in the group, which has surged by 75.69% within the last two weeks! Radix was examined in a new video by a local YouTuber influencer with 18.4k subscribers!
Chinese and Japanese Community: The global announcements such as the Gleam giveaway and Treasure Hunt have been shared in multiple Wechat crypto and blockchain communities in China, as well as spread on Chinese crypto enthusiasts’ timelines in Wechat. The contents on http://learn.radixdlt.com/ are now being translated and shared with the crypto users in China and Japan, aiming to establish a thorough fundamental understanding of our project! The Japanese community’s response to Radix's appearance on the market is good. We are starting to gain followers on the new Radix Community Japan Twitter account, seeing mentions of Radix in local blogs as well as people joining the newly created Japanese telegram group.
Cryptobirb: Our good friend Cryptobirb recently had an interview with Business Insider and listed Radix as one of his gems! If you can’t open this link, you can view the article in this video:
Gleam: Thank you to everyone who has been participating in Gleam Giveaways and giving shoutouts to Radix! We have listened to our community and increased the number of winners of our giveaway campaigns! Join the latest giveaway if you haven’t already and win prizes from a pool of $500! Join here.
*Updates provided by members of the Radix community. It may contain inaccuracies.