Radix Report 8th July

July 8, 2021

Overview

Piers Ridyard, CEO – Radix DLT

I am happy to report that everything is coming together as we march towards the Olympia Mainnet at the end of July. The support shown from the community when we decided to postpone the Olympia launch has been greatly appreciated and has motivated the team to ensure a successful launch on the 28th.

The few tasks remaining before the Olympia launch are progressing well, and new items, such as the launch of the Stokenet test network, have gone smoothly.

On the marketing front, the campaigns are performing above expectations. The extra month has given us time to line up extra media coverage and produce additional content for those discovering Radix for the first time.

This Radix Report also marks the end of Q2’21, where we can reflect on what has happened. In this time, we have successfully launched and tested the Betanet with the help of our community and validator testers, our marketing metrics have continued to grow even faster than in Q1, and larger projects such as GoodFi and the Radixdlt.com website refresh have been well received and gained a lot of attention.

So now, let me pass over to the various teams!

Strategy & Marketing

Adam Simmons, Head of Strategy - Radix DLT

In the lead-up to the Olympia mainnet launch, many of our marketing campaigns have been stepped up. They are already delivering some great results and growing momentum. Alongside the campaigns, a lot of content work has been ongoing ready for the launch. We’ve also been looking back at our performance from Q2, where I am pleased to say we have seen strong growth in nearly all channels!

Here are some of the highlights from the last two weeks:

Q2’21 has grown on our success in Q1. It started with the launch of the new website, which saw an update in our style and messaging. The community has grown with a 22% increase in our Telegram channel, a 20% increase in Twitter followers, and a 15% increase of users on Discord. Our Twitter reach alone has increased by 69% to over 4.4m impressions in the last three months! Overall, growth is accelerating for Radix - and that isn’t even counting the considerable reach we have had in third-party outlets like Cointelegraph and influencers or from GoodFi.
In the last two weeks, we have seen even more growth thanks to the Olympia marketing campaigns. Our social channels have increased by 9.7% in two weeks, Twitter impressions are up 128% (thanks to success with Twitter ads), and engagements are up 40% in the same period. This attention has also helped drive a near 13% growth in the Telegram channel, thanks in part to the AMA’s Piers has been doing in other Telegram communities.
Speaking of the Twitter Ads - our initial testing has shown a lot of traction, with 1.4M impressions generated in the last two weeks and over 1,000 new followers from it. This has fed into a wider campaign, including the first three influencer videos for the Olympia launch campaign already live, such as the OJ Crypto Interview with Piers, which have generated 31k views already.
On the content side, the final section of the Cerberus Infographic Series was released. Not only have we seen a great response from the Radix community to this explainer series, but it has already generated 7000 views since launching on June 11th. For a piece of evergreen content that we expect to be referenced by the community for a long time, this is extremely positive.
As some of you may have noticed, learn.radixdlt.com has had a facelift since we first launched it at betanet. This is all part of our larger plan to have a full knowledge base for those looking to learn more about Radix and the wider DeFi space. Over the next few weeks, we will be publishing over 150 new articles to Radix Learn that will provide long-term benefits for awareness and understanding of Radix.

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To end on a fun note - on Tuesday we launched round 2 of the Radix Swag competition. This time the creatives in the Radix community can help design a limited edition mug for the Radix Swag store.

Development

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

Busy times of course for the development team. One silver lining to the delay of the mainnet release is that it has given us the breathing room to do a more relaxed shutdown of Betanet. Many thanks to all who joined us for Betanet, from wallet testers to node-runners and everyone else who gave us feedback! We also now have taken the opportunity to release the Stokenet test network ahead of mainnet launch – where our work, and community testing, will continue.

Like Betanet, Stokenet is still a pure test network where Radix controls the majority of test-XRD tokens to stake. However, for Stokenet, we intend to make best efforts to stake in anybody who successfully connects and registers a validator node to Stokenet and wants to test participation in consensus there. Connection details for node runners are coming next week.

We’ve also been able to use the postponement of launch madness to get a head start on some of the nice-to-haves that were otherwise planned as post-launch updates. Nonetheless, we’re ramping back up for all of the coordinated activity that must happen to release a public network!

Some highlights of the past two weeks:

Stokenet, our first long-running public test network, has been brought online.
We have greatly improved our understanding and handling of “unhappy paths” for Instapass onboarding; still more to do here to ensure everyone’s experience is as smooth as possible.
Lots of work on coordinated forking, a nice feature for updates that allows the network to automatically synchronize the epoch at which it will switch to a new software version as soon as node-runners have updated their software and are ready to transition.
Updates to our Bech32 addresses for all networks. This allows for a consistent, easy understanding of what network an address, token, validator, or transaction belongs to.
And, of course, stabilization. We’re using the extra time for testing, performance optimization, documentation cleanup, and improvements to our node runner CLI.

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Media & Community

Media and community activities are significantly picking up as the long-awaited Radix mainnet approaches. Here are some of the highlights of the last two weeks:

Radix CEO Piers Ridyard writes for Cointelegraph on the barriers keeping DeFi from emerging victorious.
Broad coverage of Radix in Chinese media: Jinse, Huoxing24, Chainnews, Bihu, Bishijie, Mytokencap, Block360, lichang, Bitkan, fengniaocaijing and chainnode.
Piers was a guest in an interview with Crypto Birb, another Interview with YouTuber OJ Jordan (16k followers), a project overview by Professor Crypto (120k followers), and a great overview by Hack Crypto (32k followers).
Piers did various AMAs, such as an AMA with Satoshi Club, an AMA with Crypto Differ, an AMA with CryptoScape, an AMA with Decentralized Club, and an AMA with the ShinChan community.
The Radix wallet count keeps increasing, this time by 4% in the last 30 days!
Also, big-time YouTube coverage of Radix is coming up ahead of mainnet; keep your eyes peeled!