Backing The ‘Frictionless Finance’ Startup Radix Is Localglobe And Transferwise

The Decentralised Finance Protocol As Exhibited By Radix

As of today, the decentralised finance protocol on which the new financial apps connect and to be built on top of is Radix, the U K start-up raising $4.1 million in new funding. 

It counts the Ethereum network and the number of other DeFi projects as competitors backing the company as the London based seed-stage VC LocalGlobe as also TransferWise co-founder TaavetHinrikus. 

Separate from the non-profit Radix Foundation, Radix DLT Ltd raised $ 1.9 million previously in equity funding in the form of a SAFE note to be issuing 2.4 billion tokens by the Radix Foundation. 

Radix DLT in its words is, therefore, building a decentralised finance protocol aiming to provide frictionless access, liquidity as well as programmability of any asset in the world as claiming it has overcome the scalability issue is the Radix team typically plaguing decentralised finance and blockchain-based ledgers. 

Earlier in a public test of the Radix network, it claimed to have achieved over 1 million transactions per second as a throughput over 5x higher than the Nasdaq at its peak.

Positioning itself as different from other distributed ledgers and decentralised ledgers and decentralised protocols is Radix not trying to be a general-purpose platform according to CEO Piers Ridyard as the decentralised finance is by extension the financial industry that is highly specialised sector requiring a highly specialised set of tools and incentives. Here it is unlike the general-purpose protocols coming before it such as Ethereum as Radix is building a layer 1 protocol specifically for decentralised finance. 

It took more than seven years of R&D to be carried out by the founder Dan Hughes who is a self-taught coder from the North of England where Ridyard says that Radix’s sole focus on the DeFi from the get-go means that Radix is, therefore, lowering the barriers to adoption via integrations as the payment rails as well as the consumer applications and increasing on-ledger liquidity by making it as easy as possible for those developers building new DeFi apps. In this case, the latter is seen to be consisting of the Radix Engine which is a developer interface claiming to enable quick public ledger deployments using a secure-by-design environment.

Explained Here Are The Reasons Behind The Problem DeFi Potentially Solves

Proponents of so-called DeFi at the highest-level point to the fact that every system in finance comes to be essentially built on its own, proprietary, non-compatible technology slack as it still has far too many human processes behind it. Here come the examples of the London Stock Exchange, the US Nasdaq, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange is built as islands, and to trade across them, it requires centralised technology, protocol, and legal integrations with each. 

As Ridyard says it is because finance, lending, borrowing, swapping, and issuance are all done in which are these little islands of technology requiring legal contracts as well as those of the Excel spreadsheets that are sent over email as the major connective tissue. Whereas no APIs are improving the process as there is no such thing as a standard API, Plaid became a $5.3 billion company for essentially this reason. 
From day one being decentralised and interoperable it can trade across ledgers and asset classes programmatically that DeFi systems come such as the Radix wants to provide. 

As Ridyard explains, this core and key difference for assets and services are therefore built on public ledgers as soon as they are built on Radix which becomes interoperable. He can therefore seamlessly and programmatically move his assets from the services of one application built by one company and team to that of another built by the different company and team to that of another which is built by a different company and team but issued and launched on the same decentralised public ledger. Here the public ledger acts as the interoperable platform for the start-ups experimenting and building better versions of existing products or the entirely new products that are just not possible with the current systems. 

As noted, Ridyard says that from the consumer point of view are the products and services that aren’t likely to change much in their appearance as they are still accessed via mobile apps probably offering via regulated companies as they are today and instead of that he says the consumer-facing upsides are sure to speed, higher rates on deposits as well as the seamless ability to swap between asset types without needing to go into cash as the interim asset. 

Concluding The Discussion

Adding to that the Radix CEO says he should stress that the decentralised finance comes not to be about moving existing banks onto public ledgers, whereas it is about unbundling of banking services into the applications that can all interoperate on the single public network. While banks are like newspapers coming into the internet age some make the transition but not all. 

From LocalGlobe’s Saul Klein the statement comes that he sees the same revolutionary potential as it is in the Radix team as it did with the Skype as well as Netscape team that were at the birth of the internet and they are excited to join them at the start of the new decentralised network revolution.