Wilson here with some sad news to report: I live only a couple of hours from New York City so I was naturally planning to attend the Alexandria Preview Event in person. Unfortunately, I contracted pneumonia last week and I'm still recovering, so I decided to keep it safe and stay warm. It was still a great experience to attend the event remotely: overall it went flawlessly and exceeded my expectations, and in this blog I provide the highlights and key takeaways from the event.
Radix CEO Piers Ridyard kicked things off with an introduction to Radix, and how the key to building a great product is listening to your customers. To me this is the Radix team's key differentiator: they really listen, and not just to customers but also to developers (as explained later in the presentation) and even to humble validator node operators like me.
Before getting into the feedback collected from customers and developers, Piers described a great analogy with the gaming industry: he described how in the early days of gaming developers with Physics PhDs would spend countless hours coding physics rules into their games, until game engines such as Unreal Engine and Unity emerged. These game engines provided physics rules and other functionality that developers could use to build their games, which allowed them to spend more time on the aspects of the game that were more important, such as the story, visuals, and gameplay. Likewise, the Radix Engine takes away the complexity and reduces effort significantly for building decentralized applications (dApps), allowing developers to focus on building great dApps. Piers finished by circling back to his introduction to share that based on the feedback Radix received, the number one issue in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is that there isn't enough developer talent in the industry. Piers concluded by describing how the learning curve for languages such as Solidity is too steep for most developers, and how Scrypto solves this problem by allowing learning at "hyperspeed".
Chief Product Officer (CPO) Matthew Hine picked things up, starting with another brief introduction to Radix for audience members who may not be familiar with it. Matt took a great approach by describing how money evolved throughout history, leading to the creation of banks and modern finance, and how banks' low service levels do not make sense in the Internet age, such as low-interest rates for savings accounts and the high costs and delays for sending money to other countries. DeFi is meant to solve these issues, providing better services cheaper and with more choice. However, DeFi is not doing this today because of platform limitations that hold back developers, as well as the lack of developers who know how to use DeFi platforms.
Of course, this introduction was leading up to how Radix solves both of these problems by providing a platform that does not have these limitations-the Radix Engine-while providing a way to accelerate learning and coding on the platform, which is Scrypto. The Alexandria release will include offline (i.e., not on the ledger) versions of Scrypto and the Radix Engine v2 that can be used locally to build dApps. Alexandria has not been released yet, but a preliminary version of Scrypto and the Radix Engine v2 simulator is available for download from https://github.com/radixdlt/radixdlt-scrypto. These local versions of Scrypto and Radix Engine v2 were released to build developer adoption and incorporate feedback from the developer community into the code before the release of Scrypto and Radix Engine v2 into the ledger in the Babylon release.
This release timeline fits into Radix's strategy for building developer adoption, and Matt described how the right approach is to promote adoption by building a movement, instead of creating a flash mob, through organic growth starting with a few passionate people who start spreading the word. If the idea or solution proposed is better, it will spread among the community and continue to grow, and the Radix team is confident that Scrypto is a much better option for development. Matt then surprised me by giving a shout-out to node runners! He described how "node runners are not there just to make money, they're helping build the community and want to participate in the movement." Radical Staking definitely fits this description and we're proud to be a part of the Radix community. Matt concluded with an overview of the Radix roadmap, recapping the Olympia release, and describing the coming Alexandria, Babylon and Xi'an releases. This slide from Matt's presentation provides an overview of the roadmap, and the full keynote from Piers and Matt is available here.
Radix CTO Russell Harvey picked things up, leading the Scrypto developer workshop. The workshop started with the demo from https://github.com/radixdlt/radixdlt-scrypto, and expanded upon it with a gumball machine example. If you're a developer and are interested in going through the Scrypto workshop it is available here, and below are some important tips:
You need to go through the installation steps for the Scrypto demo before watching the video, as they take about 30 minutes or so to complete.
In step 4 to install the simulator, the git command in the instructions will throw an error. You need to use the following command instead:
git clone https://github.com/radixdlt/radixdlt-scrypto.gitThe Integrated Development Environment (IDE) used by Russell in the presentation is Visual Studio Code, which you can download here.
You'll get $25 USD in XRD by signing up at https://developers.radixdlt.com/sign-up
The presentations from Piers, Matt and Russell were very informative and renewed my confidence in the direction Radix is going. There will be much more to come from the Radix team, and I'll continue to keep the community updated through the Radical Staking blogs.
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