For those who missed it, in June I wrote a Mid-Point Review on progress thus far. Now, at the end of the year, we take a look at the highly anticipated Breakout 2024, and give our final marks.
For anyone who missed it, or may want to refresh their memory, this is based on a blog post from 5th March 2024, accompanied with a vlog where Piers explained why soon is 2024, in what was the first announcement of Breakout 2024. Different areas were focussed on, along with a statement of what we can expect by the end of the year. For ease we’ll take them one by one, in the same order he outlined them in.
Massive liquidity growth
“Finally, trustless bridging of your assets into radix”
This year we saw Maya Protocol integration of Radix for cross-chain liquidity, followed by THORswap. RocketX integration also took place, and beloved Radix projects such as Astrolescent & Caviarnine soon added cross-chain bridge utility, with stunning results. Piers was right, assets such as BTC, ETH & SOL could be bridged into our ecosystem. Perhaps for complete accuracy, Piers should have also added that assets can be bridged off too, although that may have been saved for a demo.
At the time of writing, there are some technical issues with Maya, and unclear date of return. However we were told there would be bridges, and bridges there were.
Mid-Point Score 5/10. End of Year Score 8/10
Project ignition
On 14th March, Radix announced Project Ignition with $10m in liquidity incentives. Liquidity in one of xUSDC, xUSDT, xwBTC, or xETH could be added to an Ignition Pool within a DEX, and for every $1 of wrapped asset added, Project Ignition supplied an equal amount of XRD on the other side with some impermanent loss (IL) protection.
Project ignition saw Total Value Locked (TVL) increase 76%, from $30m on 14th March, to $53m on 28th March. For the Mid-Point Review, TVL stood at $34m, which was down as a result of $XRD’s poor performance, languishing at $0.04…
At the time of writing this piece, 30th Dec 2024, we are at $26.4m TVL, that's less than before Project Ignition launched.
In fact, we have experienced a >10% decrease. One could make a case for proportionality, and 30m TVL at 4c $XRD compared to 26m TVL at 2.4c $XRD indicating more tokens are locked. However this misses the point. The purpose was to increase the TVL, which Project Ignition has categorically not delivered. Moreover, the effects with the Ignition unlocks, the majority of which are set for Mid March, are yet to be determined.
Mid-Point Score 8/10. End of Year Score 0/10
Multi-million $$ Ecosystem Funds
“real money being put behind the fantastic builders in the radix ecosystem”
Now this is a difficult one. The New Radix Ecosystem Fund was announced on 30th May with 250m $XRD ($10m at the time of announcement, $5.8m at time of writing) to providing “support to projects at every stage of their development”.
At the time I was very bullish on this. It was a large sum, and I thought it would facilitate many builders with the tools needed to build. However, in practice it has been very different. The most recent recipients can be read here and while there are some stunning projects included, there are many well documented frustrations and anecdotes of seemingly superb projects struggling with their funding and some teams even pausing work on radix for the time-being.
As a non-builder, but with several builder friends within the ecosystem, I’ve had several frustrated conversations with people who would love to be able to do more within radix, but are constrained for financial reasons. Often this is that the process is slow, which a restructuring didn’t help with, and that the initial $5k is simply not enough to begin development, especially when a team is involved.
One argument I see is “well if there is no business case, perhaps they shouldn’t be building?”, which is a fair point. However an Ecosystem fund is in place precisely to bridge that gap and allow builders to deploy something which can eventually grow. It’s the precise reason incubators exist.
On Nov 19th, an announcement was made that the ecosystem fund would change in 2025 to streamline the process and give more upfront to grant winners. This feels like a step in the right direction. However, this piece is a Breakout 2024 review, and so that is what we are basing the score on, and what started off as a very promising announcement, resulted in too little money going to too few builders.
Mid-Point Score 10/10. End of Year Score 2/10
Institutional capital
Piers spoke a lot about institutional capital, and since the Mid-Point Review, we have seen institutions such as Twinstake, Copper and most notably Brevan Howard Digital being onboarded to manage the Radix Endowment Fund.
Now Dear Reader, I really wanted to be excited about this. However my journey into crypto is from an anti-establishment, libertarian perspective, so it’s hard to get hard over institutions. But ok, it’s not 2010 anymore, and crypto isn’t just a playground for cypherpunks. Like it or not, institutions are here to stay. So I was happy to park my initial scepticism, and see what happens.
The Brevan Howard Digital play was to include an $XRD denominated fund. Essentially, they are tasked with growing the amount of $XRD they hold. This should cause buy pressure, and number go up. Ok sweet. To do this, they would be given $XRD to manage, and in order to stake it, Copper and Twinstake need to be involved. Alright, it’s falling into place.
However, the introduction of this not only saw staking reward APYs for stakers drop by One Percentage point, but the top two Nodes now hold 10% each. I was fortunate enough to be able to ask Dan on a space whether this was an issue, and the short answer was no.
The question then quickly moves to, when will we see the effects of having onboarded these institutions? At the time of writing, we understand Brevan Howard Digital have deployed strategies, but with $XRD sitting at 2.35c, the effects clearly haven’t began. Long-term, I’m not excited, but I really hope to be wrong, and years from now be basking in the glory of Piers’ twerking for institutions.
Once again though, this is a Breakout 2024 review. Having institutional involvement with no actual benefit to regular holders is in this author’s opinion, no breakout, and so must be scored accordingly.
Mid-Point Score: N/A extension granted. End of Year Score 1/10
Massive Scalability Tests
Ok so, for those who may not know, I am a huge fan of Dan. His articles on Why Sharding is the solution to scalability are a must read for anyone even vaguely interested in this space, and he is pretty much single-handedly the reason I am such a Radix Maxi. His work, insight and downright dedication over the past decade to find a solution to the trilemma, is genuinely phenomenal. I am bullish on everything Dan related, with the now sadly memeable exception of his making and sticking to deadlines.
Despite the 1m public TPS test being scheduled for Jan 2024, and the “throughput record breaking attempt” promised by Piers in Breakout 2024, no such tests took place. Cassie (now Radix Labs) had several very impressive community-group demonstrations of simple and complex TPS throughput, culminating in hitting millions of simple transactions per second, and 2.2m swaps per second. It’s difficult to overstate the magnitude of this achievement. We take swaps for granted on Radix. I can go to Astrolescent, and buy & sell from multiple different pools. This counts as one transaction, whereas on other networks, it would be multiple. As such, doing and sustaining millions of swaps per second is groundbreaking, and is required for crypto to go mainstream.
Problem is a closed-group test, even with a dashboard, is always going to have critics. It’s for precisely this reason that a third-party verified public test was so exciting, and this was scheduled for Dec 18. However, two days before the test, additional requirements from a third party verifier were made, and the test was postponed to Q5 2024.
I am 100% behind the decision to postpone. After this much time, waiting an additional couple of weeks in order to satisfy an independent partner who will attest to the veracity, is a no-brainer. However, this is a Breakout 2024 review, and the sad truth is the public Big Bang test, simply didn’t take place.
Mid-Point Score: 10/10 (based on progress and assumed trajectory) End of Year Score 1/10 (based on outcome)
Mobile-to-Mobile dApp Connectivity for the Radix Wallet
Success! First seen through the brilliant WOWO Tip Bot, it’s now common to be able to interact with dApps via the Radix Wallet, without having to leave your phone. Trading, staking, buying and selling, all through mobile. I remember Haseeb, $HIT Co-Founder, telling me just how easy mobile optimisation for $HIT staking was to implement.
I’m not quite ready to go fully mobile, and keep my more serious wallets on a ledger which therefore still requires a laptop and browser extension to sign, but the mere fact that Radix has different levels of Degen is incredible. 100% degen? How about pure Telegram like the superb & pioneering releases from EarlyDev(ED). Dip your toe? Mobile-to-mobile WOWO tipbot. Funds SAFU? Sign on ledger. Horses for courses. Lovely Jubbly.
Mid-Point Score: 4/10. End of Year Score 10/10
Seed-Phrase Free Web3 Experience
The Mid-Point review simply read “No news yet. No extension granted”. 2024 is ending, and still no news. Whether there was an under-estimation of time-frames, or prioritisation of pre-authorisations to make sure the Cuttlefish Protocol could be deployed to make Anthic possible, I don’t know. In the grand scheme of things, I care little about this one compared to say, Roadmap to Xian. However it was presented in Breakout 2024 as something that would be delivered, and wasn’t.
Mid-Point Score: 0/10. End of Year Score 0/10
Massive user-base scale-up / Big Red Marketing Button
“multi-million dollar user onboarding campaign, developed with an award-winning mobile game studio”
In May we had Token Trek, a soft-launch into the highly anticipated “Big Red Marketing Button” that was RadQuest.
The hype for RadQuest was palpable. A Multi-million dollar user onboarding campaign developed with an award winning mobile game studio. This was going to be it, our moment in the spotlight!!
As it transpires, RadQuest was a disaster. The few dollars in rewards, available to anyone who could access a new Sim card, was enough for the platform to be inundated with airdrop farmers, and the launch to be subsequently paused. RadQuest was re-launched on Sept 4th, but by then any hype had been well and truly extinguished.
Vulnerability to airdrop hunters aside, it was a great idea, with terrible execution. An uninspiring purple otter, Jetty, appeared out of nowhere to walk users though a few on-chain activities. It lacked the charm and gamification that many were expecting.
Ironically, the greatest thing to come out of RadQuest was the ED version, EarlyQuest. The best thing I can say about RadQuest is it provided the material for ED to take it to a different level; more tasks, humour, charm, on-chain activities, tutorials, it has absolutely everything and launched successfully on it’s first attempt, without a multi-million pound campaign behind it, or an award-winning studio. ED, we salute you, sir.
However, this is a Breakout 2024 review, and both Token Trek and RadQuest were terrible.
Mid-Point Score: 7/10 (based on 10,000 new users one week after Token Trek Launch). End of Year Score 1/10 (based on user scale up at End of Year)
Massive breakout dApps
Piers spoke about dApps breaking out from Radix, and “reaching out into the world”. At the time of the Mid-Point review, I highlighted the brilliant Selfi Social and the University of Sussex selecting Radix as the only Blockchain capable of handling their novel Carbon Tokenisation scheme as potential breakout Dapps. However, in the second half of the year, we remain bubbly.
Looking forward, Anthic may result in more on-chain activity. However my limited understanding is that this is a liquidity aggregator that would work under-the-hood, and plug into existing DEX’s, rather than a “killer dApp” in and of itself.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it seems strange for Piers to have spoken about breakout dApps coming this year, when most of those would be community built. Unless of course, the community were given the means with which to go and build - but as we discussed above, that was underwhelming.
I think from a Breakout 2024 perspective, it would have been great to see the Foundation champion more of the existing ecosystem. Selfi could easily be the breakout dApp, and yet Beem is seemingly flying solo while Solana throw their weight behind Blink. EarlyQuest and now rly.fun both have the potential to be breakout projects. WeAreMonstas do superb work with gamifing NFTs, as do NFTWars, however I am yet to see any of the above pushed in a meaningful way, which is really disappointing. If RDX works is focussed on institutional partnerships, and the Foundation on expediting the Xian roadmap where possible, then championing community projects as much as possible is the obvious way to leverage what is already being built.
Mid-Point Score: 5/10. End of Year Score 3/10
Key exchange listings, oracles, custody providers
On 9th May, Radix announced that an application for Binance had been made. We did not get listed on Binance, or Kraken, or Coinbase.
I defended the announcement at the time. My thinking was maybe Binance were testing the waters of community engagement, and some news is better than no news. However with no proper T1 exchanges listing Radix, it’s so difficult to get noticed. For those based in the US, our largest market, buying is a nightmare.
In terms of oracles, Supra, RedStone & Morpher integrated with radix. From the Custody Provider side, Copper integrating Radix provided the necessary infrastructure for the Brevan Howard Digital deal.
However, the lack of a T1 exchange dwarfs all of this. It’s an absolute disaster that we still aren’t listed on one.
Mid-Point Score: 1/10. End of Year Score 1/10
So there you have it, Radix’s Breakout 2024 review. The hope after writing the Mid-Point review was that we would snowball, and see more announcements towards the end of the year. Whilst there have been some wins, the performance of RadQuest, the lack of a T1 exchange and the absence of a public scalability test for me are unfortunately the headlines.
It’s good to try and end on a positive note, so here we go. Strangely, as more time passes, we become earlier and earlier. 2025 has the potential to be massive. If we kick off with a successful world-record breaking scalability test, and champion more of the ecosystem, we have the chance to attract more users to what in my mind is the only platform that can meet the demands for mass adoption.
