Radix is What Web3 Noobs Think They Bought

Radix is What Web3 Noobs Think They Bought

October 18, 2024 | 6 min read

The dream is real, but only Radix can deliver it.

The promise of Web3 is an open-source state machine that brings permissionless finance to anyone with an internet connection. This vision is so powerful that despite being clouded by scaling bottlenecks, network outages, centralization, and complex developer experiences, it is still compelling enough for investors to have poured billions into inherently flawed networks in the vain hope that they can manifest a global finance revolution.

Unfortunately, revolutions don’t happen by sheer force of will; they take foresight, planning, and innovation over many years. The only network to have made a true assessment of what the vision requires is Radix. Ten years in the making, with a unique pre-sharded state model, cross-shard consensus and runtime engine; even a bespoke database; Radix was built expressly to bring the entire $400tn financial system onchain and fulfill the true promise of Web3.

To paraphrase Dr. Daniel Kim, “Radix is what Web3 noobs think they bought.”

Solana: TPS for Ants

The Solana Foundation recently announced that their Firedancer client can process 1m TPS. This is an extraordinary feat of engineering, but, basically, pick a meme to satirize how inadequate these numbers are.

The world’s stock exchanges collectively host around 2-3m TPS. Extrapolating from research by McKinsey, Grand View Research, Cisco and Statista suggests that by 2029 this could reach 20-30m, plus ~1m credit card transactions, ~20m crypto swaps, tens of millions of IoT transactions, and many millions more via AI agents. Throw in relatively new mediums such as Telegram bots and Solana is at least two orders of magnitude short of being the future of finance, without even considering factors such as induced demand or positive feedback.

Solana has chosen to focus on vertically scaling a monolithic chain, rather than horizontally via sharding, which is standard for modern databases, cloud services, big data technologies, search engines and content delivery networks. Radix, on the other hand, has gone all-in, pre-sharding its state model into 2^256 discrete partitions. This affords the network huge efficiency advantages in the form of parallel execution and deterministic indexing, while avoiding the data reorganization costs of dynamic sharding, and the bandwidth congestion of single-threaded chains.

Radix’s pre-sharded state is a world away from traditional blockchains and took nearly a decade to devise, but the results are validating the approach: Dan Hughes and Radix Labs recently hit 2.2m TPS on Radix’s Cassandra testnet with only 64 shard groups. Because of the peer-reviewed linear scalability of Radix’s cross-shard consensus protocol, Cerberus, doubling the shard groups will double the TPS capacity, making it the only chain capable of onboarding the global financial system.

In a 2019 interview, Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko said, “I don’t think we would be near the finish line if we had tried to build a sharded chain.” In the same interview he refers to sharding as “a really hard computer science problem”, and assumes that hardware and bandwidth improvements will outpace Web3 adoption. In our view, these are all fatal assumptions that will ultimately strand Solana on a local maximum. Firedancer will doubtless squeeze every ounce of performance from its high-spec validators, but Radix can also compound its performance with low-level, vertical optimizations but on a fundamentally more scalable substrate.

Ethereum L1: Turing Complete Shambles

Global capital is easily spooked so tends to settle in stable, predictable jurisdictions with a strong rule of law such as the UK or Singapore. The more lawless or capricious a country is, the less likely companies are to invest in its long-term future.

In Web3, ‘code is law’, but what happens when that law is full of bugs? By design, Ethereum’s smart contract language, Solidity, is Turing complete. This gives developers maximum flexibility when writing applications, but effectively institutes a system of common law that evolves one hack or security breach at a time. Developers must thus spend 90% of their time patching every conceivable exploit in abject fear of being the next rekt.news headline. Over time, existing applications harden and become more robust, but the pace of innovation is unnecessarily slow as every novel application or protocol standard is forced to run the same gauntlet. The situation is not helped by the fact that transaction logs are not legible to end users, placing the burden of security entirely on the shoulders of developers.

Alongside Ethereum; Aptos, Avalanche, Base, BSC, Cardano, Cosmos, Fantom, Harmony, Hedera, Mixin, NEAR, Polkadot, Polygon, Ronin, Shibarium, Solana, Sui, Terra, Tezos, and Tron are (or were) all Turing complete and together account for over $8bn worth of security breaches since September 2020.

Users hoping to colonize prosperous new network states have instead found themselves in chaotic dystopias with few enduring applications. Mercenary, short-term speculation is rampant, but beneath the froth it is likely that the inherent instability of these networks has deterred many users from building Web3 bluechips.

Radix has its fair share of meme coins, but under the hood it has a much more opinionated structure that can be likened to well-written statute law. For example, assets on Radix are not defined by hand-written smart contracts, but are native to the protocol and can only exist in a finite set of states. Any attempted violations of these states will fail automatically, without developers having to think about it. Furthermore, all Radix transactions are prefaced with a human-readable manifest that clearly shows which assets will move and where, allowing the end user to form an additional layer of security. Taken together, these measures constitute a stable environment, giving developers the confidence to build for the long term, and the freedom to focus on application logic rather than security.

Ethereum L2s: Ground Control to Major F**k-up

Around 2021, sharding was dropped from the Ethereum roadmap in favor of scaling via external aggregators known collectively as Layer 2s (L2s). At the time, L2s were likened to shards and the pace of development led many to believe that certain limitations of the architecture could be overcome. Three years later, L2s are magnitudes slower than next generation chains like Solana and Radix, but their biggest flaw by far is that they have fragmented the liquidity, composability, and narrative of the Ethereum ecosystem.

The magic of decentralized finance (DeFi) for consumers is that on Layer 1 (L1) chains, applications and pools of capital can be composed like Lego bricks into more complex structures and utilized in a single transaction. Most users might not realize, but over 70% of Ethereum transactions touch three or more smart contracts. L2s ruin this harmony by introducing trust boundaries between themselves and the L1, meaning that assets and applications on one L2 can’t natively communicate with those on other L2s or the L1. Strategies do exist for users to bridge assets between the various realms, but all of them ultimately break the atomic commitment that exists between native entities, opening the door for assets to be stranded if one step in a transaction were to fail.

It’s absurd to imagine that in the ruthlessly competitive world of mainstream global finance, such an obvious risk would be tolerated, but the Ethereum Foundation are so bereft of solutions that they have let the situation metastasize. In contrast, Radix has insisted on the strongest possible composability guarantees because anything less will not be enough for Web3 to be taken seriously.

It’s Decentralization, Stupid

Whether it’s Radix’s state model, scripting language, or runtime engine, they are all ultimately subordinate to one thing: decentralization. We already have a financial system that is generally fast and cheap, but every year our purchasing power is debased without due process, and regulations such as ‘accredited investor’ rules stifle our ability to combat it.

Central governments say to their citizens, “We don’t trust you. We’ll run the software.” And they do: the software of money, association, education, healthcare, etc. Web2, as an extension of government, says the same. Bitcoin showed that these problems can only be addressed by ultimately removing monetary policy from centralized control. Web3 takes this innovation and builds on it with a complete network state that trusts its citizens to run the software, fostering a culture of ownership, honor, dignity, and belonging. Technicians tend to discount these considerations as immaterial, but history shows again and again that decentralizing power is essential for prosperity. Even the threat of a User Activated Soft Fork of Bitcoin in 2017 proved that ultimately, Layer 0 is sovereign, not Layer 1.

Decentralization also happens to create an extremely hospitable environment for capital, being immune to the friction of national borders, different regulatory environments, credit checks, KYC requirements, etc. This being the case, the most successful network state will be the one that effectively decentralizes power to its users and harnesses both the energetic culture it creates and safety and freedom it affords.

Ultimately, Radix's architecture has been optimized for both the social and economic benefits of decentralization. Large, energy hungry validators are easy to identify and shut down but Radix’s 2^256 shards can be run on devices as small as smart watches and IoT devices, making the network both highly participatory and highly resilient against centralized control.

While many Web3 newcomers believe they've invested in a trustless world computer capable of disrupting global finance, the reality is that only Radix has taken the necessary steps to make this dream a reality. In the coming months and years, users and capital will migrate to the only network state without bottlenecks, bandits, or trust boundaries, and build the most liquid and productive economy the world has ever seen.

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