Overview - Piers Ridyard, CEO

On February 18th we kicked off a competition for the community to build example implementations of decentralized exchanges (like Uniswap) using Scrypto. This was the first little test of the power of Scrypto and what is being delivered by the incredible dev team here at RDX Works, and the results were pretty awesome.

Although still early in the life of the fledgling language, Scrypto continues to provide glimpses into what an incredible competitive advantage to a DeFi project on Radix it will be  - not only reducing the time to go from idea to fully working code, but also increasing the complexity and intelligence that can be applied to the design of a DeFi system in the first place.

Here are a couple of quotes from the winning participants about their experience building, but I strongly encourage you to go and give it a try for yourself, it’s a pretty rewarding experience, even if you are doing it for fun: https://developers.radixdlt.com/

[It took me] maybe about 8 working hours coding after 2 hours of planning to get the majority of the DEX developed (not including comments/docs/tests).  That's kind of mindbogglingly efficient to get the idea on the table.  I absolutely spent more time trying to figure out the inconsequential crypto library I used (which was poorly documented) than doing any Scrypto-specific on-ledger development. - devmannic

For approximately 2 months now, I’ve been learning Scrypto and using it to build various dApps and I’m blown away by Scrypto and the Radix Engine as a whole! I believe that the fact that an AMM DEX can be implemented in 2 weeks or so speaks for how powerful yet simple and welcoming Scrypto is. - 0xOmar

While I was coding ChainDEX I found Scrypto to be powerful and easy to learn. I come from a background of Java and C so it took some getting used to the pickiness of the language, but once I did I found the compiler to be very helpful. It feels hard to do things wrong. I think the asset-oriented paradigm is easy to understand and works well, but some features do still need to be added to make sure there are no limitations. Which is understandable considering Scrypto is only at v0.3! - FR05T8YTE

To learn more and see the actual code produced, please jump in here - https://www.radixdlt.com/post/scrypto-dex-challenge-results

Huge shoutout to devmanic, 0xOmar, FR05T8YTE and everyone else in the Scrypto community that participated in the competition directly, or who has been hanging out on our community Discord and writing the docs and answering the questions and generally providing the incredible, welcoming support that makes all of this possible in the first place.

You are the real heroes here.

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

I wish everyone could have been at our DC RadixRevelation Meet Up last week. We had 18 people (some familiar with Radix, some not; some familiar with DeFi, some not) to learn and share with each other. It was electric. Big shout out to Max for organizing such a successful event. I particularly enjoyed meeting a young man named Antonio, the facilitator of a crypto trader/learner group who shared a screenshot with me of how he described Radix as an “OC” project…”Out of Control.”  That’s what a #RadixRevelation looks like.

We also had our first RadixRevelation Meet Up in Hanoi, Vietnam!

Spread the #RadixRevelation

To see a list of our upcoming meetups around the world, see here. To sign up to host your own and get your “Meet Up in a Box” PDF, go here.

A few other highlights: 

• Mark your calendar for May 10th when Radix takes over the Brave browser home page. It’s going to be big.
• Speaking of Brave, our ads there are starting to show some nice ROI. Check this testimonial out (and there are a LOT more like this).

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• And looking forward to the big industry event of Consensus in June, Radix is a top-tier sponsor of the exclusive Coin Center dinner.  If you look at the other sponsors, you’ll agree that they will all be honored to be listed next to us! 

• Finally,  this Saturday, April 9th, we have our first Developer event of the year, in Lisbon, where our CPO, Matt, and CEO, Piers will be in attendance, is  completely sold–out with a waitlist. ‍

• ACTION OPPORTUNITY: At 150,000 Twitter followers the Radix merch store will reopen! We have teamed up with WBO cruiserweight champion Lawrence Okolie to release an exclusive Radix X Okolie merch line. For every item sold, $5 will be donated to UNICEF, Lawrence's chosen charity.

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

On the tech front, the last fortnight has seen a lot of movement across our product teams toward a grand coordinated Babylon push. Babylon represents a host of interdependent product releases – core node, gateway, Radix Engine, Scrypto, and Babylon wallet (name TBD) – and so development efforts are starting to transition toward building the first pieces of the skeleton of the combined system and defining the interfaces between products and teams for Babylon.

Work is beginning on restructuring the core node for Babylon-style state, with transitions defined by the new transaction manifest and running through the new Radix Engine v2 asset rules. This is the beginning of a road that will culminate in Alphanet in the back half of the year, when we’ll have the first real functional network with REv2.

Meanwhile, parallel work continues on Olympia network enhancements, including coordinated forking which is nearing completion.

Scrypto work continues apace, as we drive toward our next big release with a much updated authorization model that we’re very excited about, plus other enhancements. We’ve begun applying this new auth philosophy to control of resources as well, which is feeling very nice.

Babylon wallet work continues in strict stealth mode, with the primary focus at this stage on technical research on some new syncing and cryptography tools that we’ll need in our toolbox, as well as ongoing UX research which is showing strong promise; it feels like we’re really onto something with what the future of the web3 user experience should be.

Meanwhile, another Olympia wallet update is in the works. This one will take a little time, but we’re finally getting to an oft-requested mystery feature!

Update from the Radix Community*

Our updates are moving!

We did a soft launch of getradix.com with a complete redesign. It's a little rough around the edges still, but we're ready to start making it better. You can see our backdated announcement here: getradix.com/updates/news/2022-03-31-new-getradixcom-site-launched

We just wrapped up Cryptoworldcon Miami 2022 (April 1st, 2022 to April 2nd, 2022) which went pretty well. Even though attendance was less than the event creators expected, we managed to get 88 attendees to install a mobile Radix wallet (RadBag.io) and to join several Radix project telegrams.

On April 3rd, we hosted a private party in Miami and partnered with Miami Hack Week to let the Miami crypto and tech scene know that Radix Community throws amazing parties, and that they are must-attend events.

We also have some updates from the Community Projects and Global communities for you to check out.

You can see the full announcement here: getradix.com/updates/news/2022-04-05-cryptoworldcon-party-community-updates

We've started posting these updates at getradix.com/updates, and we're going to aim to do them every week. We'll keep on providing a brief tl;dr to share here, but for the full update, visit getradix.com/updates to see what’s new from the Radix Community Council and what's happening in the community.

*Updates provided by members of the Radix community