Overview

Piers Ridyard, CEO - Radix DLTThe crypto space progresses at great speeds, and the fact we are now into Q2 is testament to that. Looking back at the last quarter there is a strong sense of growing momentum, both with Radix and the industry as a whole.

This feeling of growing momentum is reflected across every aspect of Radix. In the last 3-months alone; the number of wallets holding eXRD has increased over 180%, our social channels have seen engagement double, Radix has been featured in multiple articles & by multiple influencers, Radix communities have been launched in a range of languages, and the whole Radix team have been pushing forward to reach the objectives for the year. It is amazing what has been achieved in the last three months, and I know I am not the only person to be excited at what is due to come in the coming months.  

For everyone working on Radix, Q2 will be a very busy period with major milestones like the Olympia Betanet going live on April 28th, and the Olympia release launching later this quarter. Alongside the updates in the Radix Report, make sure to keep a close eye on our blog to keep up with the latest news, as there are a lot of updates due over the coming weeks.

Adding to the feeling of growing momentum, the last two weeks has seen a flurry of major news for the whole industry. Tesla has started accepting Bitcoin as payment for cars, Visa announced USDC settlement capabilities, and PayPal launched crypto options at checkouts! Individually these announcements could be considered a major milestone in the adoption of cryptocurrency, yet together emphasise the mainstream attention the industry is attracting.

It’s an exciting time for everyone involved in the space, and it’s an especially exciting time for Radix. Let’s take a look at what has been going on.

Strategy & Marketing

Adam Simmons Head of Strategy - Radix DLT Every time I sit down to write these, I am always amazed at how the pace and excitement continues to build each time. The whole team is buzzing, the Radix community is growing, and there are lots of exciting things coming in Q2! But for now, let’s look at the last two weeks:

• The official social media channels have continued to grow. In the last 28 days, the reach of the Radix Twitter account has increased over 44% compared to the previous period, with engagement on the website and other social channels continuing to grow.
• It’s been fantastic to see many of the potential validators and Radix community engaging in discussions about node running on Radix ahead of betanet and the Olympia release. Both the #node-running channel on Discord and the community-made Radix Validators Reddit have seen lots of new members and questions. This engagement is fantastic to see as delegating stake is such an important aspect to ensure the security of the Radix network. I’d also like to thank some of the amazing people in the community who have been translating some of the node running information!
• To help with some of the questions popping up, Matt and Ben have put together an Olympia Betanet FAQ which will be updated over time - if you see any questions that you think need adding, make sure to tag a member of the team on Telegram or Discord.
• The Radix DLT team is continuing to grow, and to showcase this we have a new regular feature on the Radix blog where team members can share a little more about themselves, and what gets them excited about Radix! The latest Meet the Team featured Ben, Head of Partnerships, and Mikael, Head of Community. If you’re interested in joining the team, make sure to check our careers page to see open positions.
• Work has been continuing on a refresh of radixdlt.com, with the build now fully underway with updated messaging and design language. Having spent a lot of time in Q1 working on how we communicate our vision, products, and future of DeFi, I can’t wait to share the updates with everyone!
• The number of wallets holding eXRD has grown to 7565 holders. This means that in Q1 the eXRD holder number has increased by 187%!

Development

Russell Harvey, CTO & Matthew Hine, Head of Product - Radix DLTWith betanet just around the corner, our focus has been on performance tuning, scaling up our internal test networks, and progressing with an updated implementation of the Olympia wallet.

• Reviewed hundreds of community betanet validator submissions and applied some categorization to ensure we get a diverse pool of validators for testing.
• Made several changes to the structure of transactions in order to further optimize storage usage and overhead.
• Improved our peer-to-peer connection management, fixed some edge cases where nodes which had been offline could take too long to re-sync with the network.
• Lots of adjustments to our performance monitoring to better capture and visualize the status of large networks.
• Rewrote our long-neglected faucet to better support both internal tests and public beta access.

Media/Community

Wrapping up Q1 with another 2 solid weeks in media and community. Let’s have a look at what happened and how Q1 went!

• Several major and in-depth articles about Radix have been published in the media, for example ‘Smart Contract Vulnerabilities Are A Ticking Time Bomb Holding Billions of Unsuspecting $$$ Hostage’ (Hackernoon), ‘Trilemma? Quadrilemma! Inside Radix’s Innovative Tech Stack’  (BTC Manager) and 'Tired of Unreasonable Ethereum Fees? Keep an Eye on These Five Alternatives' (Coinspeaker).

• Piers has done 7 AMAs in big Chinese, Korean and global communities in March, all around eXRD being added to MXC. You can see the summary of one of those AMAs here.
• The Chinese Radix community has grown by 15% in March and we now also have 9 Radix Ambassadors from China. Ambassadors are key people supporting Radix that share news and updates in their network. We are looking to grow this number to 20 in Q2.
• We want to welcome the Korean community to the Radix family. Created on 24 March we already have 500 members from Korea. Radix CEO Piers made a welcome video for the Korean community here.
• The Turkish community is extremely active with over 17k messages since it’s creation on 15 Feb, a total of 2000 members are supporting Radix in Turkey. Piers sent a warm welcome to the Turkish Community with this video. The eXRD listing on MXC was also covered by our Turkish influencer friend Crypto Emre.
• We are very excited for Q2. Not only are Betanet and Olympia coming, but there are rumors of a new Radix website, dozens of AMAs and major GoodFi news. Rumors about announcements of announcements. You heard it here first!