‍Overview - Piers Ridyard, CEO

Today the first Radix public network, Olympia, turns one year old. 

This is a huge milestone not just for the technology but for the community as well. The dedication and passion shown by everyone has been incredible, even at this early phase. 

Let me just give a quick shoutout to everyone in the node runner community, the developer community, all the people already building on Olympia, those getting started with Scrypto, everyone in our telegram, discord and Twitter communities. 

We couldn’t have got this far without you guys, and you are helping build towards something game changing as we approach Babylon.

Secondly, as you might have already seen, our community competition to build a lending application using Scrypto has just closed and we have been super impressed with the results - 15 high quality submissions and applications as broad as micro-lending and under-collateralized borrowing with credit scores and attestations.

If you want to start seeing what the future of DeFi lending might look like, honestly these competition winners are a great starting point: https://www.radixdlt.com/post/scrypto-lending-challenge-results

Lastly, let me leave you with some quotes, directly from the competition winners, about how frigging awesome Scrypto is:

“With a professional background in C, C++ and Java I spent four weekends of June learning Rust and Scrypto, both new to me at the time, and by July I felt like I was already putting out production ready smart contracts. Scrypto has proven remarkably easy to get into and its built in security framework gives me great confidence that I can focus mostly on my business logic while the Radix engine takes care of the gnarlier stuff under the hood. This has been a very pleasing journey into the realm of smart contracts and I'm already planning my next project.”. – ScryptoNight

“After 3 months with Scrypto, this, along with my previous prize on the Oracle challenge will be a proof of achievement for myself that I can finally be confident in my coding skills and can now really participate in building the new wave of financial revolution among other Scryptonauts. Moreover, Scrypto was the starting point of my programming journey and initiated my passion for coding. Why don't the next era be that: Anyone can code. And there will be a DeFi world with no more scam or exploit” – Peter Kim

“Developing with Scrypto is a thrill. The asset-oriented style feels very interactive as I can imagine tokens flying around and using them as objects to design systems. It made a lot of my designs elegant and bold as I didn’t have to worry as much about security. If I did something I wasn’t supposed to, the Radix Engine just yells at me that I can’t do that. This doesn’t limit me, by the way, it helps me become a better designer!” – PostNutClarity

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Strategy & Marketing (Adam Simmons, CSO & Jeremy Epstein, CMO) 

The first ever “Dev Swarm” event took place on Saturday, July 23rd with simultaneous events in Lisbon, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, and Szeged. We had over 300 developers attend and the power of Scrypto was evident to all of them.  

As one attendee said:

“With a professional background in C, C++ and Java, Scrypto has proven remarkably easy to get into and its built in security framework gives me great confidence that I can focus mostly on my business logic while the Scrypto engine takes care of the gnarlier stuff under the hood.”

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As with any first time activity, there are plenty of learnings and we’ll integrate those into future activities, but a very strong start and judging from some of the Twitter comments from participants, a worthwhile investment.

Also, as today, July 28th marks one year since the #Radix Public Network was launched, we are hosting 20+ meetups around the world to celebrate this milestone in the history of DeFi.  Fantastic to see the global community of Radvocates spreading the word of the #RadixRevelation.

In other news, the FooHack continues to generate excitement, as the story was picked up in Yahoo, and we also finished the feature-length documentary on the experience. Check it out here.

Speaking of video content, the two videos from Consensus are done and live.  Both the overview of the booth experience and our Dev event there.  Hope you can feel the energy.

Speaking of energy, we had 64 initial submissions for the 1st run through of the Dandelion Marketing program!

And last week, we published Rekt Retweet #12…keep those hack suggestions coming.

Finally, the CEO of Radix Tokens Jersey, Andy, presented on behalf of Radix at the AWS FinTech Executive Forum on July 20th in London.

Bottom line…it may be the summer and others may be slowing down, but we keep right on rolling.

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Development (Russell Harvey, CTO & Matthew Hine, CPO)

The Scrypto lending challenge has come to a close, and once again our developer community overachieved and delivered some seriously high quality implementations. Lending is a vital part of a healthy DeFi ecosystem, and it’s great to see how quickly devs were able to educate themselves on a complex topic and build working products. Be sure to read up on the winners, or check out the submissions for yourself.

Our first Dev Swarm event had an incredibly strong turnout, further reinforcing our conviction that Scrypto is fulfilling its promise of a better way to build and striking a chord with developers of every stripe.  We’re angling to get v0.5 out at some point in August, which will include an early implementation of fees, local components, and some other goodies.

Inside the tech team it’s still nose to the grindstone on Babylon implementation, with work progressing steadily on the node, the engine, our shiny new wallet, and a couple of things that we’re not quite ready to pull back the covers on yet.  Still a lot of code and testing ahead of us, but the gears of the great machine are inexorably turning towards Alphanet.

Update from the Radix Community*

- Radix is a very exciting crypto project and we have an amazing and inspiring community. From Wonderwoman, Chadix, Piers Ridyard’s cool hairstyles and many more incredible members, we are one of a kind crypto community in the space without a doubt. Thank you to all who completed the Radix Legends Quiz! Like the previous community project quiz, we had great engagement with 464 participants and we got a CES/CSAT score of 95/100 (the participants gave the quiz 4.7/5 rating)!

While we are gearing up for the next quizzes, we congratulate the winners of the Radix Legends quiz! (Please drop an email to deniz(at)getradix.com if you want your project to be included in the next quiz) 

300 XRD winners: @YleniaMNG, @Radman_xrd, @Rdxbryn, @Billy_Hill, @MdMdsihan5 

Radix Community T-shirt winners: @Radstakes, @degenerateg, @jmaryjmaryj, @tprukop, @frencherer 

Please send a DM to @denizdenizdenize to receive your prizes! 

- New community competition alert! How do you explain Radix to your friends and family? Do you have a hard time whilst explaining it? We are looking for the 3 community members who can do the best ELI5 (Explain Like I am 5) Radix! 

To join the competition, you need to tweet your ELI5 Radix explanation  and use the hashtags of #ELI5Radix and #RadixExplained on Twitter. The top 3 winners will get 1500, 1000 and 500 XRD respectively. The competition will end on the 4th of August Thursday at 8pm UTC. 

- We interviewed Faraz from Radstakes and talked about the challenges node runners face to keep high uptime, how some validators differentiate themselves and what people might want to consider when choosing a validator to delegate stake with https://getradix.com/updates/communityspotlight/radstakes-interview 

*Updates provided by members of the Radix community.