Background Behind Radix (XRD)
Radix was created in 2017 by its current CTO and Head of Engineering, Dan Hughes. Hughes is a highly regarded blockchain developer with a history running as far back as 2011. He was previously associated with Bitcoin scalability projects, along with Blocktrees in 2013, Directed Acyclic Graphs in 2015, and Channelled Asynchronous State Trees in 2016.
The forerunner to Radix was Tempo, which he worked on at the beginning of 2017 and which notified his invention of Radix later that year. In effect, Radix acquires a significant chunk of its underlying ideology from Tempo, along with the important concept of sharding to expand blockchain transaction throughput.
Radix intends to displace Ethereum as the go-to platform for dApp developers. As a result, it has launched a proprietary Ethereum Virtual Machine alternative dubbed the Radix Engine, a Rust-inspired programming language for dApp development called Scrypto, to compete against Ethereum’s Solidity and opted to implement delegated proof of stake as a consensus mechanism.
It’s worth bearing in mind that Radix’s public mainnet initiative occurred in July 2021, following four years of active development and testing since the project’s proclamation in September 2017. Within that period, Radix core developers launched the native XRD token on the Ethereum network to help in fundraising efforts.
Radix (XRD) Basics
Radix uses a new consensus algorithm called Cerberus to help secure the network while giving it a higher level of scalability performance that could be desirable to specific applications.
Radix also futures its own smart contract execution environment, the virtual machine dubbed Radix engine, which allows developers to map business assets to pre-built Radix components.
The project is aiming to be an alternative base layer to blockchain like Ethereum or defi applications.
Radix has a native token XRD that holders can use to participate in the networks Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism and earn inflection rewards.
Radix current token XRD is a placeholder erc20 tokens on Ethereum that will eventually exchanged for mainnet XRD tokens in 2013 using the Bitcointalk.org forums, Hughes started a project called e-money between 2013 and 2016 he explode multiple options based layer scaling solutions for decentralised protocols including block trees dags and channel asynchronous state trees before settling on a structure called Tempo.
Hughes started building radix, a new base layer decentralised ledger protocol built to support smart contracts development that featured Tempo at its core.
According to the team Tempo allowed radix to hit high levels of performance during its testnet phase.
The crucial piece of the Radix Protocol is the consensus mechanism dubbed dPos. The mechanism is not unique to Radix, as it has been employed by several other decentralised networks, including EOS, Tron, and Cosmos.
With a dPoS network, stakeholders can participate in transaction validation by delegating their responsibilities to node operators. In return, node operators share their rewards from transaction validation with their delegates.
Node operators are required to stake a portion of their tokens to qualify as transaction validators within the network. The stake acts as a security feature to incentivize appropriate behaviour by the nodes. Any unacceptable actions will lead to slashing, which is the process in which the stakeholder loses a portion or the entirety of their tokens permanently.
It’s worth aware that slashing is potentially a risk shared between the node operators and their delegators, depending on the terms of engagement between the parties. If that’s the case, it behoves the delegators to carry out proper research when choosing a node operator to stake with.
Radix Blockchain
Radix Protocol is a self-standing blockchain, launching its main net in July 2021.
Radix (XRD) Staking
As a PoS network, node operators require XRD tokens to stake. Staking ensures they are well incentivized to perform as expected and avoid compromising the network or causing adverse outcomes.
Other functions that XRD and its e-XRD counterpart token can perform include facilitating value transfer. As assets, users can send and receive both of these tokens as payments for services or goods offered.
Radix (XRD) Mining
Currently, you can’t mine Radix, but yield farming may be implemented in the future.
Radix (XRD) transactions fee Speed
Radix uses its Cerberus consensus algorithm to validate and finalise network transactions. This mechanism doesn’t rely on the concept of block time and instead focuses on the confirmation of transactions.
According to the team, Cerberus can confirm transactions in less than a second, which becomes final in roughly five seconds.
Radix (XRD) Supply
XRD has a circulating supply of 10.13 B XRD and a max supply of 24 B XRD.
Radix (XRD) Security and Safety
Fumbles, heroic acts, and dApp failures are a common scene within the DeFi space, and Radix attributes this challenge to the complexity of Ethereum’s Solidity development language and its vulnerability. According to Radix, Solidity is too specialised and complex, increasing the chances of deploying vulnerable code.
As a solution, Radix proposes its alternative crypto dApp development language based on Rust, one of the most popular general-purpose languages. Scrypto is both simple to use and familiar to most developers with a Rust background.
Radix (XRD) Volatility
Radix Crypto Coin volatility portrays how high the prices fluctuate around the mean or its average price. In other terms, it is a statistical measure of the distribution of Radix daily returns, and it is calculated using variance and standard deviation.
Review and Final Thoughts on Radix (XRD)
Radix Protocol is trying to solve one of the largest pain points of Ethereum and most other major blockchains scalability. With its implementation of the dPoS inspired Cerberus consensus mechanism, it is able to scale to an infinite theoretical figure.
Ethereum upgrading to a staking mechanism with sharding technology could partly solve its current problem and possibly fend off promising upstarts such as Radix a little longer.