This Project Might Give Web3 The Radical Refresh It Desperately Needs

Radix DLT is the world’s first full-stack for DeFi, with the team behind it set on building the foundations for Web3 to truly scale and obsolete traditional finance for good - a feat still to be conquered by those building in the space. 

While the project isn’t to be fully launched on the public network until next year, after 9 years of building, on December 8, the dedicated and focused minds behind Radix will be unveiling how they plan to radically change the face of finance at the free virtual event, RadFi 2022. Find out more here.

Despite the impressive growth registered by DeFi throughout 2021 and beyond, Ethereum and other smart contract platforms have been beset with problems of security and scalability, which has made it difficult for platforms to develop production-quality DApps. 

The Ethereum network, which first launched smart contracts several years ago, uses its native programming language Solidity, which is fairly easy to learn for simple smart contracts but gets incredibly complex and difficult to make secure. Many who’ve tried it suggest it would take years of programming experience with Solidity before it can be used to create secure and stable code. As a result, it’s prone to hacks, exploits, and failures even when built by experienced developers.

If DeFi is to go mainstream, it needs to be able to radically improve in order to support a global shift for the $400 trillion banking and financial system that currently hosts billions of users worldwide.

Why Have Web 3.0 And DeFi Development Suffered?

At the core of what it takes to enable a digital ecosystem to thrive is its developers - a demographic who, ironically, has had one of the toughest onboarding journeys into Web 3.0 so far.

Despite the growth of developers in Web 3.0 continuing to somewhat increase, only a small percentage of the world’s software engineers currently work in Web 3.0. The number of developers working specifically on DeFi projects is even smaller, and there are nowhere near enough programmers to achieve the scale of DeFi envisioned by its proponents. Of the almost 30 million developers globally, those trying to break into Web 3.0 are just a fraction.

Here are some stats from the Electric Capital Developer Report (2021) on Web3 developers:

• 18,000+ monthly active developers commit code in open-source crypto and Web3 projects.
• 34,000+ new developers committed code in 2021 alone, which is the highest so far.
• 2,500+ developers are working on DeFi projects. 
• Less than 1,000 full-time developers are responsible for over $100 billion in total value locked in smart contracts.

The team building Radix believes there are four major barriers DeFi developers face that are hindering the growth of DeFi. Its goal is to solve these problems through four crucial technologies that build the backbone of the Radix network:

Achieve scalability without breaking DeFi composability, for which Radix developed Cerberus consensus protocol

1. Avoid smart contract app hacks, exploits, and failures through its Radix engine
2. Build interoperable DeFi dApps faster through the creation of a DeFi blueprint catalog of reusable code
3. Incentivize the decentralized development community through its developer royalties program, which is directly managed by the platform

After nine years of innovative development leading to an impressive roadmap, those behind the project are about to finally unveil exactly how Radix’s radically different infrastructure will finally take Web3 mainstream. 

Radix is building “the future of DeFi” on an asset-oriented approach, which is fundamentally different from Ethereum and almost anything else currently existing within the ecosystem. 

With Ethereum smart contracts, users don't actually hold or directly control their tokens, and instead rely completely on the smart contract and its ability to maintain a list of balances that defines the “ownership” of each token.

Unlike most smart contract platforms where your tokens aren’t actually stored in your wallet, with asset-oriented DeFi built on the Radix Engine, users will actually hold their tokens within their own smart contract account on ledger and would not need the approval of other smart contracts to spend their own tokens. They can also define exactly how many tokens they intend to pass to or receive back from smart contracts - vastly improving security and enabling the concept of a “trustless” ecosystem to thrive.

To make the advantages of an asset-oriented paradigm real and usable for developers, Radix has built its own custom programming language, Scrypto, which enables the Radix Engine’s unique features while maintaining a much-improved development experience with expressive logic.

Scrypto’s asset-oriented features, and the lifecycle of a “component” (a Scrypto smart contract), would naturally allow developers to focus on their own business logic and lean on the Radix Engine for intuitive, safe handling of assets. 

Once the final deployment of Radix is complete, developers who build on the network will be able to build efficient, secure, and usable products much easier than ever before, and in a way that resembles the fast-adopted simplicity of traditional fintech. 

The team behind Radix doesn’t seem to do anything by halves. Ahead of the release of ‘Babylon’ next year – the DeFi ecosystem that will enable Scrypto “component” smart contracts to run on network – Scrypto was made available in a private environment earlier this year for developers to experiment with early builds & tests. Within mere months, excitement was buzzing among the developers who took up the opportunity, with many pointing out the considerably cleaner experience in comparison to other smart contract languages. Scrypto has been gaining more and more traction since, with more than 130 projects now having been built onto the platform before it’s even public.

Here are some excerpts from those building on the project so far:

• “Using Scrypto is kind of like bowling with the bumper walls up so you can't hit the gutter (hacks, bugs, composability issues) and it's faster/easier to get a strike.”
• “Scrypto is a game-changer. Once folks from the other ecosystems figure it out, they will come to Radix to build. We'll see an explosion of DApps being built for the network.”
• One analogy is a visual comparison of a poor man's toolbox with a hammer, wrench, and ruler (solidity tools) vs a fully sponsored workshop with power tools, a lathe, a table saw (scrypto tools)

Recurring events like that of FTX’s demise prove the crypto industry needs to migrate from trusting centralized institutions often held to little accountability, to public decentralized ledgers – where all holdings and transactions are transparent, and where users actually control their own funds. If the Radix technology roadmap is delivered, the project might just be the first to truly build what’s needed to enable a new, improved, financial ecosystem powered by Web3.

On Dec 8, Radix is hosting a free virtual event — RadFi 2022 — with over 10,000 people pre-registered, where the minds behind the project will unveil how they plan to take DeFi mainstream. Find out more here.

Read Radix’s whitepaper on DeFi here to educate yourself on the company’s ambitious and transformative project before heading to RadFi 2022. 

To read the most recent Benzinga articles on Radix click here and here.

If you would like to know about Radix’s journey and its products, visit the company website.

This post contains sponsored advertising content. This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be investing advice.

Featured image from Radix