Overview - Piers Ridyard, CEO

In the last two weeks our press coverage has increased substantially. This is both reflective of the work that Adam and Jeremy have done in refining our story and messaging over the last few months as well as the great work members of our community have been doing in recommending Radix to journalists and influencers. See all the coverage in the next section.

Huge shoutout to everyone who has been swinging for the fences for us on that front, as well as a big thank you to all the journalists and media outlets who are helping to bring the good gospel of Radix to the world!

In addition to this uptick in press activity, the eagle-eyed of you will have already spotted that we have now released the newest version of Scrypto - Scrypto v0.5. This newest flavor, of our impossibly morish programming language, has some big additions to fee handling (with Royalty mechanisms coming soon). Plus we have a new concept - “owned components”, and my personal favorite - human-readable portions of Bech32 addresses!

Read all about the Scrypto goodness here: https://www.radixdlt.com/post/scrypto-v0-5-released

Lastly, we have had many new additions to the RDX Works team in the last year. If you would like to understand how we split work and keep everything focused, then look no further than the Development update - it takes a lot more than you might think to launch a successful ecosystem!

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

We’re gearing up for our two big tradeshows in back-to-back weeks at the end of the quarter in September, Messari Mainnet in New York and Token 2049 in Singapore. 

We’ve learned a lot from our efforts at Consensus and other shows and I can already see how we’re going to have a much more integrated, refined, tighter showing there. Not to say that our previous efforts were not great, they were, but we have an opportunity to do better…and we will. Let us know if you are in NYC or Singapore during those times.

There are many other exciting things going on in the marketing team, but I’m particularly pumped about the solid uptick in PR coverage we’ve had as of late, including:

• A featured interview with Ivan on Tech featuring Radix
• An interview with Piers in Hackernoon, “Scaling Blockchain with Radix”
• Piers’ article 3 things that could hinder Web3 (CoinTelegraph)
• Radix: A Full-Stack Layer 1 Protocol for Building & Scaling DeFi Applications (Blockonomi)
• When It Comes To Smart Contracts, Safer Assets Are The Key To Better dApps (TechStartups)

• Preventing DeFi Hacks & the Need for Better DeFi Developer Experience (CryptoNews)
• As DeFi Hacks Soar, This Startup Wants To Radically Overhaul Smart Contracts To Prevent Them (Crypto Daily)
• How Radix Is Redefining ‘Scalability’ In DeFi Apps (the Crypto Basic)
• Radix Review – Unique L1 Protocol Aiming to Revolutionize DeFi (CoinCodex)
• Standard Doesn’t Always Mean Best:EVM’s Critical Flaws (CoinGape)
• Working Backwards from the Solution (Analytics Insight)
• Ben was quoted in Finance Magnates on the Ethereum Merge
• CoinTelegraph quoted Adam  in Decentralized finance faces multiple barriers to mainstream adoption
• Bloomberg Law quoted Piers in Seized Crypto Auctioned Thanks to Fintech Firms’ Tracing Tools
• And earlier this month, Piers had an article in Venture Beat: Starting your development journey into the world of Web3

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We’re going to keep pushing on that as we get towards the end of the year.

And before I go, I want to give a HUGE shout-out to Jimmy (@jimthereaper) who made the intro for us to Ivan on Tech and advocated for us.  It’s precisely this kind of community-led activism that makes a huge difference.  Dude is a hero.

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

We’re going to do something a little different this time and talk a little about how the development sausage is made inside RDX Works.

It’s easy to imagine that we’re all a bunch of coders working to a huge master plan, knocking off well-defined items between us and Babylon. In reality, production software development on never-been-done-before things is a gnarly looping process of defining product goals, resolving big-picture design issues, cutting code with that design as the guide – and then discovering things that lead to iteration on the goals, designs, and implementation. It’s not just design-then-grind, but a constant process of applying good judgment to make sure we’re building the right product.

And on top of that, Babylon isn’t just a single product – it’s a collection of complex products that need to work tightly together.

To accomplish such a thing, we gotta get organized.

And the way we organize is through product teams. (If you want to know more about our general philosophy of defining and running product teams, a book called Inspired strongly influences our approach.)

Each product team has a clear mission, and the sum of those missions add up to the ambitious long-term RDX product mission: To give builders everything they need to create a radically better financial landscape. By giving each team their own distinct, meaningful mission, it allows smart people to make good decisions and work efficiently, confident that when everybody does their part, we’re all gonna make it.

Functionally this means that, for example, one product team is responsible for core protocol while another is responsible for the wallet. But the mission is more important than the deliverables. Why do we build a wallet? Because we need to make it as easy as possible for people to connect to DeFi on Radix. That kind of mission helps ensure that the wallet doesn’t just check a box; it’s going to help Radix win.

To make these concrete, here’s how we break up the overall Radix mission into product teams for Babylon:

The Builders Team makes sure developers can rapidly build great dApps (through Scrypto and other tools).

The Network Team ensures Radix has the right decentralized infrastructure for dApps run by a strong node-runner community (through the core protocol and gateway).

The Core-Apps Team focuses on getting users and their assets connected to dApps (through a new wallet and more).

The Services Team builds bridges for assets and identity to the Radix network (through independent services like Instapass and Instabridge).

The Projects Team shadows the role of developers, building dApps like a new explorer and supporting crucial third party integrations.

The Developer Ecosystem Team, while not formally having a code deliverable, makes sure that developers have a great experience plugging into the Radix community and tools.

Every product team has a crucial role in making Radix successful, and the nature of their respective products and how they fit together will become clear as we get closer to Babylon launch. Sometimes that work is easy to talk about, sometimes there’s chunky turn-the-crank work that is hard to grok unless you’re in the trenches with that team every day. Sometimes they need to keep some secrets to not tip our hand. But every team is pulling hard toward Babylon with their own mission firmly in mind.

And if it’s not obvious, these are just our product teams! We have lots of other excellent teams focused on various aspects of marketing, recruiting, operations, compliance, and much more. But we’ll leave those for updates outside of development.

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Update from the Radix Community*

📒📕📗📘📙Radix Community Project Quiz Vol:2 📒📕📗📘📙

- Radix Community Council is back with the second Radix Community Project Quiz! To spice things up, we increased the prizes from 300 to 500 XRD which will be given to the top 5 scorers and another 5 top scores will get Radix Community t-shirts! PS: This quiz is a bit harder than the previous one (wink wink) :) 

- The second activity for this week is to take Radix’s social presence to another level with the Gleam Giveaway! A total of 1500 XRD will be given to participants! Join the giveaway if you haven’t already: https://gleam.io/Q8piT/1500-xrd-giveaway

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- We’ve created an ecosystem visualization to help show how big and vibrant the Radix Ecosystem is. Check it out at https://getradix.com/sharable-assets. We tried to include as many as possible and prioritized as best as we could around community activity. If we’re missing something, reach out to @StefanPersson or @denizdenizdenize and we’ll get it into the next version. Special thanks to Radix List (radixlist.com) for partnering with us to provide us with listing information on an ongoing basis.
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*Updates provided directly by members of the Radix community.