Some of the communities of Layer 1Blockchain are having a war in their own circles, with the likes and communities of Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, Elrond, NEAR, and several others going at it on Twitter and Discord daily.
A bit away from the action, and with its own fan following, is Radix, another layer 1 blockchain in development since 2018. During tests in that year, Radix showed 1.4 million transactions per second TPS, making it one of the fastest and most scalable blockchains to use.
The host of the podcast, Alex Fazel, is Radix CEO Piers Ridyard. Ridyard has spent over five years in the criptocurrency space, going from mining on the genesis block of Ethereum in early 2015 to building and exiting a YCombinator company that built deal-room software for insurance companies in 2017.
Ridyard talked about his plans for Radix, the future of DeFi and public consensus, and how it benefits the unbanked in underdeveloped economies. The maturity of the space, right, is one of the highlights of DeFi in 2021. There was this early like Cambrian explosion of ideas that came out of DeFi Summer. It went from very solid projects that have been building for a long time, like Aave or MakerDAO. And then there came this sudden understanding of being able to compose things together, and then yield farming came out. It went through a bull run of what matters is capital and how you bring capital and liquidity into the space. We are starting to have more serious conversations about how does it interact with traditional finance.? The regulatory landscape is still uncertain, and people are worried about what the SEC will do and what their approach is going to be. How do we get institutions involved? Every regulator in every country is trying to figure out how to do this properly. And I think people are feeling a little bit like, and it is not exactly the same because of the 2017 ICO boom, but there was this huge bullishness that came out of it, right? People were like, Oh, we're going to have a token, banana token or Apple token, or like a marketplace for Labour or whatever. Very few things were built. You want to have a layer one network because that is what you wanted to do for the internet. The protocol for the internet was designed around the concept of nuclear war, where entire cities or continents could be destroyed. It was designed to be robust, and you want to do the same for the public ledger. You have the ability to go I will be regulatory compliant, and there is no reason that you can't have a permission system on top of a public ledger. It can be because of the antifragility, right. The infrastructure on which it is based is the safest possible infrastructure. There is a global yield famine because of the amount of money that has happened in the way COVID has affected the global economy, and it is very little places for capital to get good returns in the real world. We are fundamentally reinventing finance in DeFi, and all of that innovation is creating yield opportunity. And all of these institutions are sitting there going, Wow, I really would like to get some money in there.