Radix DLT has raised $4.1m from LocalGlobe, and TransferWise’s Taavet Hinrikus, to bring its revolutionary decentralised finance protocol to the public.
Designed to solve many of the pain points in today’s centralised financial system – involving lack of access, poor liquidity and high costs – Radix’s protocol removes these frictions through a series of technological advancements, while enabling the next-generation of financial apps and services to be built.
The Radix public ledger unlocks the power and potential of decentralised technology. A potential that has been promised for years, yet has - until now - remained largely unfulfilled.
The potential is so vast that DeFi is on track to be the world’s fastest-growing industry, with projections putting the market value at being worth $64.5bn by May 2022.
DeFi: The future of finance
For years, the blockchain has been promoted as the catch-all solution to solving many of today’s growing needs surrounding data, security and governance. While many of these solutions are yet to be realised – due to a distinct lack of product fit or market potential – the full power of the blockchain lies in decentralised finance.
Within centralised finance, apps and services must seek permission from each other to share data, move capital and connect on a network basis. This financial intermediation limits access, restricts the movement of capital and assets, and costs a staggering $71bn each year.
This setup also creates an unequal system where the wealth and regulations are controlled and governed by a centralised body.
Public ledgers, like the one developed by Radix, are instead managed and operated by the communities using them.
This creates a decentralised, permissionless, transparent system that democratises access to financial services, while creating a network of assets to allow for the smooth, secure flow of data and capital.
This decentralised approach results in the creation of global standards around the issuance and interoperability of products and assets. Plus it radically reduces friction, creates liquidity around products and assets that would never have been liquid before, and moves finance from a handcrafted to a programmatic process.
The Radix approach
Building on the successes of current public ledgers, like Ethereum and Bitcoin, Radix’s protocol not only creates a permissionless, frictionless framework upon which innovative DeFi services can be developed and run, it has solved two of the biggest challenges – scalability and security. These solutions are built on two of Radix’s core innovations: Cerberus, a linearly scalable consensus algorithm, and the Radix Engine, a developer interface that allows quick public ledger deployments using a secure-by-design environment.
With these innovations, Radix takes the interoperable, pay-per-use, frictionless nature of existing DeFi apps a step further – standardising and simplifying the way these are built through the use of code building blocks that can be composed together.
These advances enable greater liquidity, which developers, and communities can take advantage of through the use of Radix’s APIs, and which helps the ecosystem to scale at levels not seen before.
In a major technology milestone last year, the Radix team achieved more than 1m transactions per second using its first iteration of its technology – a throughput over five times higher than the NASDAQ at its peak.
Building on this success, the team has since developed its new, more advanced algorithm, Cerberus, built to not just scale transactions, but entire decentralised applications.
Crypto winter into DeFi Spring
The funds from LocalGlobe and Taavet take the total raised by Radix to $10 million since 2013, and come at a key time for the industry.
As the crypto winter of 2018 – in which Bitcoin’s price famously collapsed – thaws, we’re entering a DeFi Spring where the market for alternative currencies is gaining traction. This is coupled with the fact COVID-19 has pushed traditional, centralised banking into overdrive, with support packages and money being printed to keep economies afloat.
Small sovereign nations are already showing signs of defaulting, and the least steady of the banks may follow if the capital markets plummet again. The coronavirus crisis may be the start of a perfect storm that will see such traditional systems making way for financial innovation on a global scale.
Radix plans to use this latest investment to grow the global team and realise Radix’s vision to build the protocol that powers the future of decentralised finance as it prepares for its token listing towards the end of this year.
Saul Klein, LocalGlobe: “I see the same revolutionary potential in the Radix team as I did with the Skype and Netscape teams at the birth of the internet. We're excited to join them at the start of a new decentralised network revolution.”
LocalGlobe and Taavet bring their huge collective experience in scaling companies such as TransferWise, Citymapper, Zoopla, and Robinhood, giving the Radix team the ability to harness the managerial acumen and input from some of the leading figures in the technology industry.
Piers Ridyard, CEO, Radix DLT: “We are confident that with the support of LocalGlobe, Taavet and our community, Radix will be able to provide the essential infrastructure required for DeFi to scale from being an emerging niche for crypto enthusiasts to the new global standard for frictionless finance for people everywhere.”