Overview - Piers Ridyard, CEO

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While the sunshine of Malibu and sweat of Austin are now a thing of (near) past, the effects of the FooHack and Consensus are not. If I were ever in doubt that Scrypto is one of the most important and needful things in the crypto industry today, I am no longer.

When we set out to create a programming language that made getting new developers into Web3.0 and DeFi as easy as possible, we knew it was a daunting task. Getting a multi-platinum selling musician from zero to Scrypto competent in less than three months, and then helping to create a decentralized chess game in less than 1 week has exceeded every hope we had for it.

Note - this is more complicated than almost every DeFi dApp currently on Ethereum. To put it in perspective, an entire class of German computer science students tried to do this using Solidity and failed.

A man without any formal coding experience, who made global hits like Party Rock Anthem, out-coded a class at an elite technical university. While Redfoo is awesome, that is some seriously incredible testimony for Scrypto.

However, Redfoo is not the only story like that, Peter Kim’s story is equally awesome, and those who missed it can see our writeup about his journey into Scrypto here.

And, of course, Consensus. The thing I heard repeatedly was the things that we already suspected were true: Solidity and the EVM have a large number of problems, other networks are little better to build on, and there is a huge need for more tech talent in the industry.

We are still digging, but it is now clear that here be solid gold.

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

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The success of the FooHack, as you read about yesterday, brings with it a lot of potential and a bit of pressure. The potential comes from having a world-famous rockstar as a committed Radix evangelist on the team.  The pressure now is on the Marketing team to make sure we leverage this asset in a way that helps drive awareness and perception of the Radix brand. 

The good news is that we are in a position to do that, thanks to the tremendous help of so many people throughout RDX Works and our talented community members who were able to participate. Over the weeks to come, with both our own efforts, as well as through influencer and PR channels, we will seek to capitalize on this unique angle.

For starters, take a look at the FooHack trailer video. I hope you like it.

In other news, after a long and thorough search,  we recently signed on a very talented senior marketer (Becs) to join the team at the beginning of July.  Becs is going to assume the role of Director of Marketing and bring her organization-building skills and process-driving capability to help us improve the way we leverage our assets, coordinate cross-team and cross-functionally, execute our campaigns, and drive results. 

Lastly, we spent the last 2 weeks solidifying our individual and team OKRs for Q3.  I’m so proud of every member of the team who has committed to the OKR process—which isn’t easy to do–and who focused on driving their outcomes.  I’ll share more in the next Marketing Wen-sday update next week.

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

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The forges are lit, the pipes are skirling away, a great drum beats in the distance, and Babylon implementation marches along, with our battle-hardened team of developers laboring away in their tireless pursuit of a functional internal test network.  Watching the tech team channels is like sitting in Mission Control during the Apollo missions.  A problem appears, there’s a flurry of activity as everyone coordinates a resolution, and then it’s back to the comforting hum of smooth operations.

One item in particular that I want to discuss is our progress on fees for Babylon.  You can think of support for fees as being divided into two main efforts.  The first is around instrumentation and metering, that is, having the capability of calculating the cost of running a particular segment of code (which, in the case of Radix, is also where royalties are accounted for).  The second is around the payment of those costs—making the system able to understand how those costs should be paid, claiming the appropriate fee, and ensuring that execution does not exceed the fee available to be paid.  Implementation of the instrumentation part of fees is quite far along at this point, and once we tie off the rest of the initial work there we’ll move on to the payment side of things.  TL;DR, we are targeting putting a larval implementation of fees into developers’ hands with Scrypto v0.5, though no promises at this point.

Don’t forget that the Scrypto Lending Challenge is live!  Lending applications are foundational to a healthy DeFi ecosystem, and now’s a great time to dig into how they work, ask questions in our Discord, and submit one of your own.  If you’ve never looked into the mechanics of how DeFi lending platforms work, it’s a great reading rabbit hole to go down, filled with innovation and competing notions of how they should operate.

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Update from the Radix Community*

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- How well do you know the Radix Ecosystem? Radix Community Council proudly challenges everyone to take the Radix Community Project Quiz! This is a fun way to discover the projects that are being built on Radix DLT. 🏆 5 winners will split 1500 XRD (300 XRD each) 🏆

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Take part in the quiz and see how you score! 

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There will be more quizzes to come with more community projects and in different forms! If you want to join the upcoming quizzes please drop an email to Deniz (at) getradix.com.

- New community spotlight interview is out with DogeCube. We talk about the team's background, their journey to launching the first memecoin on Radix, and get a sneak peek into what some of their upcoming plans are for the coming weeks and months. 

Wow! Such content. Much interest, Very excite: https://getradix.com/updates/communityspotlight/dogecube-community-spotlight

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Want to do an interview with the Community Council? reach out to Stefan (at) getradix.com or Deniz (at) getradix.com, or @denizdenizdenize or @StefanPersson on TG.

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- What are the odds of a small youtuber being discovered by people that don't even speak his language? That was the case of Welton Lupercinio, a Brazilian Youtuber that had his video discovered and referenced by the Korean community. In this video, Welton does an intelligent comparison between bees and tech startups seed investors; whereas bees do cross-polinization, favouring diversity and productivity in an ecosystem, so does seed investors, bringing smart money knowledge and experience and fostering rapid ecosystem growth on new tech platforms. 

Then he does an extensive research on Radix seed investors Taavet Hinrikus, LocalGlobe, Maven11, etc. He was also found by the Penguins team, which provided some NFTs for him to do a sortition to his Brazilian viewers.

Warm welcome to the Radix community, congratulations on the awesome work as a Radvocate, keep it up and good luck growing your channel!