Radix review: DeFi comes of age
Note: all price information taken on 18th March 2021.
There’s a show on Netflix called Fastest Car.
It’s a fun show. It pits three “sleeper” cars against one supercar in a quarter-mile drag race.
A sleeper car is an ordinary looking car that’s had every component tuned, replaced or upgraded. It looks like a regular car, but it drives like a supercar. At least, in theory.
The supercar, on the other hand, has been designed from the ground up to be the ultimate road-legal speed machine.
The people who drive the sleeper cars are usually highly skilled and highly knowledgeable. The majority of each episode shows the thousands of hours they’ve put into honing their sleeper cars and the reasons why they do it.
The person who drives the supercar is usually just some rich guy or gal who wants to show off their success.
The winner of each episode progresses to the championship, which decides the ultimate winner.
Now, it would be a pretty boring show if the supercar won every single episode. And thankfully, the sleepers win most of the heats.
But in the end (spoiler alert), a supercar always wins the championship.
The current state of crypto is a lot like Fastest Car.
You have most major cryptos trying desperately to upgrade their platforms in order to increase transactions per second, cut fees and aid usability.
The problem is, upgrading an existing platform is very different to building one from the ground up.
Just like those sleeper cars, they were never designed to work efficiently at high speed.
And no matter how much you upgrade them, they will never be as efficient or work as elegantly as something that was designed for speed from the ground up.
And if I can push this analogy even further…
Sleeper cars are only ever good in a straight line. Get them on a track and they don’t stand a chance against a supercar.
Right now, many major cryptos are getting good at going fast in a straight line. They have high transactions per second… or at least they will eventually.
But none of them can go fast around corners.
In crypto, “going fast around corners” means being able to scale applications as well as transactions.
Radix claims to be the first crypto designed from the ground up for unlimited scalability of both transactions and of applications.
In short, Ethereum 2.0, Polkadot, Cosmos, Avalanche, Algorand, Near – you name it – might be good sleeper cars… but Radix is a Lamborghini.
In fact, back in 2019, Radix achieved a record-breaking 1.4 million financial transactions per second.
Then, instead of rushing to release “the fastest crypto in the world”, it went back to the drawing board.
The creator, Dan Hughes, realised that version of Radix might be fast, but it wouldn’t be futureproof.
It wouldn’t be able to scale in the way he knew people would need in the future.
Now, two years later, he’s finally realised his vision in the latest form of Radix. And it’s arguably light years ahead of anything else out there.
Radix is the first platform crypto built for Decentralised Finance (DeFi).
(For more on what DeFi is and why it’s the future, see: Everything you need to know about crypto in one essay)
But is it really any good? That’s the question we’re going to try answer in this review.
So let’s get going.