Overview

Piers Ridyard, CEO - Radix DLTThe end of February has seen some consolidation in the market with the Bitcoin price going more sideways than anything else, but DeFi continues to grow apace - recently crossing the $40Bn in locked assets under management. An incredible achievement, but a drop in the ocean for where this space has the potential to go.As last month tears away from us and the end of Q1 of 2021 is fast approaching the Radix team shifts gears towards our first major public milestones - Betanet followed by Olympia, our name for the first Radix mainnet. The development team is getting into the testing groove, where those with wrenches (aka testing and devops) start to think about all the creative ways our trusty consensus and Sybil might be first trialled in the wild.I always feel incredibly lucky to work with the team that we have here at Radix, and it has been fantastic watching their hard work taking shape. Without stealing thunder, I will leave Adam, Russ and Matt to give some more glimpses into those worlds in their sections below.Finally, the Radix community continues to grow apace, with both a huge shoutout to our internal community team (Mikael and Jacob) and the metrics they have been hitting, as well as work by our external community volunteers such as Ben, Florian, Leomagal and many others whose work in spreading the word about Radix and continually being helpful and supportive in all our channels makes the Radix community such a fantastic place to hang out in.

Strategy & Marketing

Adam Simmons, Head of Strategy - Radix DLTThe last two weeks have involved a lot of groundwork being laid towards larger projects. While most of this is not quite ready to be shared yet, let’s start with the big news: Betanet!

• An exciting milestone for everyone involved with Radix is that there is now a public date for the betanet - April 28th, 2021. A critical part of this is ensuring a good testing environment for potential validator nodes, which is why we have opened up the Validator Community Proposal Program. For those who are interested in running a node for the Radix Public Network, and especially the Betanet, you have until March 15th to submit a proposal to be shared with the community!
• Following the announcement of GoodFi, the first version of the website went live on https://goodfi.com! This version of the site is for potential members to join and those who may wish to donate to help grow awareness of the industry - so if you know any projects who should be a part of GoodFi, please send them that way.
• With a stream of news, the official Radix Twitter account smashed through 20k followers and currently sites just over 21k - growing nearly 10% in the last 28 days. There has also been strong growth in impressions on twitter, hitting 900k in the last 28 days, a 63% increase! On Telegram, there has been strong continued engagement with an average of 500 messages per day and the Discord server is coming alive since the Betanet announcement.
• To give a sneak peak on one project that has been going on behind the scenes, the senior team, working with some highly regarded external parties, have been reviewing the Radix messaging. We’re reaching the final stretch of this before we start on the process to build out marketing collateral and a website refresh to feature this. If you have been paying close attention to some of Piers’ more recent interviews, you may have caught some hints of the direction this is going.
• The DeFi Download Podcast hosted by Piers has continued to host some great guests, and we will be starting to include a video version of the discussions on the Radix YouTube channel.
• The eXRD performance has continued to be doing well in what has been a volatile few weeks for the wider crypto markets. On Uniswap, eXRD has remained around $24m of liquidity, and daily trading volume has averaged $1.9m across all markets[1] in the last 14 days.

Lastly, I want to highlight the amazing work done by Crypto girl Deniz (@denizdenizdenize) on telegram who has been growing the Turkish Community Telegram which is now at almost 1200 members. Support from the Radix community around the world is always fantastic to see, so thank you all who are helping!

Development

Russell Harvey, CTO & Matthew Hine, Head of Product - Radix DLTAll eyes are on the prize of getting everything shipshape for betanet. The betanet will enable us to test a network and tools that are as close to the Olympia mainnet as possible. In large part this means getting around to some work that isn’t as exciting as core development, but has to get done, like reworking the interface between ledger and wallet/explorer to strip out some cruft from past iterations and getting down to implementation on things outside consensus like a specific token emissions mechanism.A few points of interest taken from the team’s resolved items list:

• Added some denial of service protection for validator nodes with rate-limiting on incoming messages based on both volume and content, plus filtering of obviously invalid messages.
• To accelerate test feedback, we are now running three concurrent internal test networks with our latest branch, the latest candidate branch, and a manually-deployed network for spot testing.
• Added a simple scheme to enable attachment of encrypted messages to transactions. This will be useful for some account verification purposes during eXRD→XRD swapping, as well as for when you don’t want anybody else to know that you’re sending payment for a rare Barry Manilow LP.
• Began persisting ledger state between our internal test networks.
• Formulated a possible framework for some “chaos monkey” testing (yes, seriously)..

Media & Community

Another busy 2 weeks in media, social and community. Things are accelerating as Radix heads into 3 major milestones with Cassandra, Betanet and Mainnet on the horizon.

• Here’s some of the latest media coverage: ‘The 5 Most Highly Anticipated Blockchain Mainnets in 2021’ (Bitcoinist), ‘These Blockchain Projects Should Be On Your Radar’ (Entrepreneur), ‘Radix and GoodFi are on the front of Bitcoinist’ (Bitcoinist), ‘This Radix-Inspired Alliance Wants to Bring DeFi to 100 Million New Users’ (NewsBTC), ‘Radix Launches Goodfi to Bring DeFi to 100 Million New Users’ (The Daily Chain).
• Various Twitter and YouTube thought leaders have covered Radix in the last 2 weeks: Radix mentioned as ‘One of the top #5 undervalued altcoins in 2021’ by the guys at Crypto Busy, 120k subscribers (YouTube). There was also another segment by Crypto Busy about Radix and GoodFi. It is great to see that Radix is regularly getting strong exposure from many other channels including; Martini Guy (85k followers) who is bullish on Radix and covers the GoodFi Alliance, (YouTube). Radix covered by Spanish Tik Toker Guillem Ferrer, 128k followers (TikTok). Blackbeard is looking forward to Betanet (Twitter), Pentoshi mentioned the upcoming Betanet and doing TA on eXRD (Twitter). Our good friend Crypto Birb will do a podcast with Piers. And Radix won a Twitter Poll: Which Altcoin will shock the most people in 2021. Oh, and GoodFi has received hundreds of mentions since the initial announcement. Exciting times.
• The main Telegram group continues to be one of the one of the best places in all of crypto to discuss technology. As usual Radix DLT’s founder Dan Hughes hosted his bi-weekly technical AMA session, here are some recent Q&As.
• Sites: Radix finally has a circulating supply and market cap on Coinmarketcap! Also Radix Betanet has been added to CoinMarketCal. Go and upvote the event for more visibility (CoinMarketCal)
• The Radix developer channel has grown to 220 members showing the strong interest to build. Excitement is building with the Betanet announcement for end of April (Telegram). The Turkish community has grown from 50 to 1150 members within weeks. Radix now also has a Turkish Medium channel with translations of some key articles (Medium).
• Wallets: Radix holder count is still on a parabolic track, increased to 5400 wallets, a 5x since November (GetRadix Live Stats)