Overview

Piers Ridyard, CEO – Radix DLT

As part of our mission to decentralize the $360,000,000,000,000 global financial system, Radix has been steadily building the tools and platform that, together, will make that possible. 

On the 12th of November 2021, we will be doing an in-person (and streamed) developer preview of our upcoming Alexandria release to give some special guests a sneak peak (with workshops) at what is coming.

Sign up to stream/attend: APE Radix NYC (Alexandria Preview Event)

As with all missions of this size and importance, it is critical to test each stage carefully. We are by no means sitting on the launchpad yet, looking towards Mars, but we have the next critical piece of our rocket engine about to come out of the labs and go into testing: Scrypto.

Building a programming language specifically for building decentralized finance is probably one of the most critical enablers of innovation possible for this space.

Steve Jobs once called the computer “a bicycle of the mind” and pointed out that humanity is essentially tool builders, and through these tools, we are able to leverage the power of our minds in astounding ways. 

With Scrypto, our aim is to build that bicycle for developers so that building decentralized finance becomes as effortless and fluent as possible - the fastest tool to get from concept to deployed application, in the safest possible way.

Much like the Wright brothers and their attempts at first human flight, it will take a few iterations to get this right, so we will be releasing Scrypto as an off-ledger development environment before it gets integrated into the Radix mainnet in our Babylon release next year.

To find out more about Alexandria, Babylon, and beyond, please see our technical roadmap here.

See you in New York!

Strategy & Marketing

Adam Simmons, Head of Strategy - Radix DLT

Following the final XRD token unlock, things have been going well! Major milestones have been achieved with the total amount of XRD staked, the latest video content from the team has been well received, and much, much more. Let’s take a look at the last two weeks:

• Radix DLT Founder Dan has been busy, showing off some exciting stuff on the Cassandra research network. As per his tweet on Tuesday, the Radix community was invited to see a Cassandra instance importing twitter with full sharding and atomicity, with support for searching on users and hashtags! It’s currently imported over 100TB of raw Twitter feeds. 
• The Cassandra Twitter demo made it to the top of the CryptoCurrency Reddit (link), with over 1.1k upvotes and over 544 comments! Thank you to all who participated in the discussion!
• There is now over 2,000,000,000 XRD staked - that takes the TVL of staked tokens to over $200m, and the Radix market cap to over $1Bn. Thank you for the support from all Radix token holders!
• The Radix Twitter account reached the 90k follower mark, this is up 18.3% since the last report. We are getting really close now to our target of 100k, so all the Radvocates helping push the account forward - keep it up! 
• The Radvocate community is growing as well, showing that the activity on Twitter is feeding into the Radix Telegram, which is up 9%, with over 750 messages a day on average.
• The whole team is working hard on generating more video content. First up, was the new format of AMA with Radix DLT Founder Dan and CEO Piers - let us know what you think of the new format! We have some more exciting videos coming up, so make sure to keep an eye on the Radix YouTube channel.
• Our meme contest had some amazing entries -  In First Place: Dan_XRD with his fantastic interpretation of the unlock. Second Place: Penol113 For an original submission, we loved the energy! Third Place: RadixEnigma High-quality design, original idea, and great use of the merch.

DataDash video on Token unlock at 27,324 views and climbing. A great summary of what occurred. We have also benefited from continued attention from some large Twitter influencers TonyMontanaATHThe Cryptomist, Wagmisaurus, CryptoTony_Bitcointrapper, CryptoNagato, AZCoinNewsSatoshiStreetBets, and CryptoMagnified.

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Development

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

These two weeks have been a combination of "deep think" and shoring up the foundations, so progress has been a little less visible and tangible. But progress there is!

We completed our API deep dive and found that there is more here to be gained than we expected. Feedback from exchanges and chain analytics providers has sharpened our approach to giving these kinds of services access to bulk network-level transaction information. And our continuing work with auditor Jepsen has been immensely valuable in analyzing the best ways for us to make the link between raw ledger state and data offered via APIs more bulletproof in all conditions. The result is that work has already begun in earnest on an API refactor that will take a little time but will be well worth it.

One more visible item was the resolution of the network access issue that we know many users experienced with the wallet and explorer. We're very pleased that as the community has updated to the latest Radix Desktop Wallet, conditions have rapidly returned to normal for virtually everyone. And we're happy to see that the new Wallet's ability to connect to community archive node endpoints has led to some of our intrepid node-runners offering such endpoints to provide more options for everyone.

In order to better communicate the status of issues like these, we also launched status.radixdlt.com where we will post information related to issues on the Radix mainnet or Radix services that might decrease the quality of user experience.

For the developers among you, you may have seen our announcement of APE (Alexandria Preview Event) Radix on Nov. 12! We know there is enormous excitement to learn more about Alexandria and our Scrypto smart contract language, and this event will finally provide the sneak peek you've been waiting for ahead of Alexandria's launch by end of the year. Before then we'll also be releasing some background information on how Scrypto works and why it's so important to take DeFi mainstream, so keep an eye on the blog.

A few more items for the last couple of weeks:

• Released Wallet v1.2.2 followed shortly by v1.2.3 (don’t forget to update!)
• Continued an exhaustive investigation on node-running operation to try to eliminate all possible missed proposals for node-runners (apologies to node-runner testers for the brief disruption on Stokenet caused by this testing).
• Laid the groundwork for much better error reporting from the API.
• Updated our internal branching strategy to be more logically consistent and cause fewer headaches.  Still sorting out the resulting teething problems in our internal test networks.