A DeFi unicorn.
At first we were miners, poker players. We could even play poker with
Bitcoin. We didn’t know where this would lead us. Those of us who saved
our Bitcoin and didn’t buy too many pizzas became filthy rich, real fast.
Then Mt. Gox happened and Bitcoin died. Everything died. But it didn’t
really die. The market came back. We went 200x with Ethereum, 50x
Icon, 100x Nano/Raiblocks, 20x Holo, 30x Quant. We caught the wave
early and printed money again. We were nerds, geeks, risk takers. It
changed our lives. We kept searching, analysing, reading, chatting…
because it was fun and because we wanted more. More fun, more
money, and more of that special feeling of being part of something
groundbreaking. Then the next winter came and we had to be patient
again. Bitcoin was dead again. Crypto was dead again. But the space
didn’t die, the market didn’t die. It came back, and it came back with a
new wave of interest we had never seen before. Then we found Radix.
We read everything we could find. And we felt that special feeling again.
We have big plans.
CHAPTER 0: Why.
Here’s the reason why we’re writing this: When we learned about Radix,
we learned the legend behind it. This tech has 7 years of research in it
and it’s designed with all 3 dimensions of scalability challenges in mind.
It solves Vitalik’s Scalability Trilemma in a way that is impressive.
Reading the Whitepaper is like poetry. Math poetry. Yes, Radix can do it
all: Security, Decentralization and Scalability. Massive scalability. In fact,
Radix scales linearly with demand and demonstrated >1m tps
(transactions per second) in 2019 while keeping full cross-shard
interoperability. It’s a unicorn. Built by a reclusive, perfectionist, genius
coder who said ‘No’ to a lot of money in 2017 when he decided to not do
an ICO because ‘it’s not perfect yet’. Three years later it’s 2020 and now
it’s happening. This could be the biggest thing in crypto in many years,
maybe since Bitcoin. This could be the platform of the future.
Is Radix going to become a top-3 project within 24 months? We don’t
know, this is crypto, anything and everything is possible. But boy does
Radix have superior tech. And boy is it being kept under the radar. We
know why. And it will change very soon. That special feeling is back and
we can’t wait to see what the future holds. We have some insider info we
will share with you. Fasten your seatbelts.
So what’s special about Radix? Let’s take 1 step back before we take 1
million steps forward.
User-to-User scalability.
Bitcoin was born. A genius idea. But then the blocks were full. People
realized there was a tps (transactions per second) problem. We need a
public ledger that allows millions of people to send transactions to each
other at the same time, without congestion! This ultimately led to things
like BCH and BSV.
User-to-Application scalability.
Then Ethereum was born and showed that there is more than
person-to-person transactions. Look, we can also build contracts on top
of decentralized ledgers! This led to ERC20 tokens and the 2017 bubble.
Then the congestion of the Ethereum network, CryptoKitties, showed that
there was a new problem: a User-to-Application scalability problem. We
need to build public ledgers that allow masses of people to interact with
dApps! This led to things like Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, Near
and soon ETH2.
Application-to-application scalability.
Then DeFi was born. DeFi = dozens of dApps interacting with each other
creating a decentralized financial ecosystem. Lego blocks being
combined freely and in a more and more automated way to create
interesting use cases. But many decentralized platforms have a
fundamental design flaw. They use sharding to scale, while ignoring that
applications on different shards need to seamlessly communicate with
each other. The key component that separates shards from just being
independent blockchains is: communication. What’s often missing is full
cross-shard interoperability. You don’t need that for CryptoKitties.
Because it’s just many users interacting with a single dApp. But you do
need it for DeFi, where dApps on different shards are communicating.
The lego blocks need to communicate. If you want a future-proof
decentralized ledger, that is.
Imagine Compound and 1inch trying to communicate with Uniswap at
the same time. Or flash loans. Even swapping tokens on Uniswap
requires this cross-shard interoperability. Because each token is a
smart-contract. Now if these smart-contracts (tokens) live on different
shards and you process your transaction using the beacon chain in ETH2
(which will be sharded, but without full cross-shard interoperability), the
price opportunity might be gone and the route would be very different.
Yes you read that right, ETH2 kills ETH1’s main use case: DeFi.
Future-Proof.
I. User-to-User scalability: Ability for millions of user transactions to be
processed at the same time.
II. User-to-dApp scalability: Ability for millions of users to interact with
dApps at the same time.
III. dApp-to-dApp scalability: Ability for dApps to interact with each other
at scale. Scaling requires sharding. Sharding leads to dApps being
placed in different shards. All those dApps still need to seamlessly
communicate with each other. At high speed and at scale
(–>‘cross-shard interoperability/composability’).
IV. High tps. Visa is capable of 24k tps with the usual demand at 4k tps.
However, a future-proof platform requires much higher tps in order to
service cross-sector use cases, not only payments. The only way to
be future-proof is the ability to scale with demand, i.e. tps increases
with the amount of users, beyond 1m tps (–>‘linear scaling’).
V. Fast finality times. Nobody likes to wait. Slow finality/confirmation
times kill use cases. Any future-proof platform must finalize
transactions within a few seconds.
VI. High degree of decentralization (it’s easy to have high tps with a low
amount of validator nodes/masternodes like Ripple, Stellar, NEO or
EOS. The platform of the future is able to run at 1m+ tps, achieve finality within 1-2 seconds at massive decentralized scale of
10-100k+ validator nodes (–> solving the Scalability Trilemma).
VII. Mathematical proof. Many platforms, including Radix, are still in
development. That is fine, the sector is still in its early stages.
However, if your platform cannot at least provide theoretical (i.e.
mathematical) proof that the consensus algorithm will be secure at
scale in the future, then there is a problem.
Many of today’s popular platforms like Polkadot, Cosmos, Cardano, Near,
Solana and, yes, ETH2 are not future-proof. In fact many of them have
some blatant weaknesses. Why? Some take ages to finalize
transactions. Some are mathematically unproven. Some simply don’t
scale to the required tps to be future-proof. Many are too centralized.
Many are platforms born to solve the User-to-Application scalability
problem of 2017 and they didn’t foresee dApp-to-dApp communication
(DeFi). Or they are older platforms that implement sharding in order to
scale, meanwhile forgetting that those scattered dApps still need to talk
to each other seamlessly. They wanted to solve CryptoKitties. And some
of them do. But they can’t do DeFi, and everything that will come after it.
There are many reasons. We don’t care about reasons. We aim to find
Unicorns. And we did.
The Unicorn and its secrets.
Radix foresaw all dimensions required to fundamentally scale a public
ledger: User-to-User, User-to-dApp and dApp-to-dApp scaling. Seamless
cross-shard interoperability, at massive scale. 1-2 sec finality at >1m tps.
Math proofs. Highly secure. They solved the Scalability Trilemma in a
way that makes them very fit for what’s required of a future-proof
decentralized platform that scales across all 3 dimensions (User-to-User,
User-to-dApp, dApp-to-dApp) without making any significant
compromises. As such Radix is only tech that doesn’t need patches or
side wheels to do complex stuff at scale. They are still in development,
which means we are able to participate early.