What are the biggest worries for Radix in terms of success?

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43

But this would be more something which hits the whole crypto sector in the form of regulations or?
Or what are you thinking of?

44

Maybe? If they see Radix as a threat? Everyone could look us as a threat, be it other chains which are not compatible with our tech, or govt institutes, or web 2 centralized big tech,…

45

But this wouldn’t be specifically against radix but rather against the whole crypto sector

I mean maybe if Radix really grows it will become a big enough thread to some

46

The problem is they see our potential and already hindering our growth, Binance also have their own chain so they ofc don’t want to list other L1.

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47

Ah ok this I can actually see happening since every chain want to lock liquidity on their network and doesn’t want to see a liquidity migration

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48

Binance list many other L1s - I don’t think it’s fair to say they don’t want to list L1s

What they do want to list is any project that has high volume trading so they can get the fees on it

49

I’m joining the conversation rather late, but I have a more paranoid perspective than what I hear.

There is a large group of experienced programmers who are believers in other crypto projects and

  1. They had hoped to make life changing investments in (say) the top 10 projects.
  2. A successful Radix will destroy the value of their current crypto investments. This puts a target on Radix’s back.
  3. They have the skill-set to understand whatever Radix source code is open source. And perhaps the wisdom to have been quietly studying it, perhaps with the assistance of TG and Discord, without revealing their nefarious motivation.
  4. The launch of Babylon (and later Xian) will be conditional on RDX Works solving all the known-unknown problems in the launch version.
  5. Murphy’s Law dictates that despite RDX Works best efforts, some unknown-unknown bugs will inevitably slip through.
  6. The people in (3) above are highly motivated to find unknown unknowns and develop attack vectors based on them. Even assuming a bounty program and an audit, the motivation to be a black hat hacker will IMO be much stronger than the motivation to wear a white hat.

As an example of a team blind spot: When Olympia was launched, it was vulnerable to DDOS attacks on archive nodes. The team did not seriously consider this to be a possible attack vector, and was unprepared for it because they had convinced themselves that only validators needed DDOS protection: because “your transactions were safe”. While true, the inability to use the Radix wallet until the DDOS problem was fixed was small consolation to people who needed to move their XRD and were unable to access their Radix wallet.

I predict several black hat attacks on Babylon soon after it is launched. Even after Radix works fixes the attack vulnerability, this leaves a stigma on Radix that will be used to generate FUD. Solana still lives with its reputation for multiple freezes. But Radix makes so many “Too good to be true” claims, that it will be under much higher scrutiny.

A related worry occurs soon after all the source code for Xian is open source. Another team will clone Xian, gaining all its technical functionality, but improve it some other way. For example this new team might use a different Tokenomics, which is much fairer than Radix’s and avoids the centralization caused by whales and super-whales. Radix cannot make such a change itself, since it has a legacy responsibility to the OG and Dan. The clone can piggy-back on the existence of a software base with all the technical advantages of Radix, but without the centralization caused by the current existence of many whales and super whales. The official team plan to avoid this, AFAIK, is to have a ton of dapps launch with Babylon. This should build a large moat around the software (and a network effect) before such a clone can threaten Radix’s dominance. It remains to be seen if the adoption of Radix can happen quickly enough for such a moat to exist. If adoption lags our hopes, this moat may never exist. I would be much more confident in such a moat if the price of XRD reflected our recent enhanced marketing effort, regardless of how long crypto-winter lasts.

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50

This is a very good argument. What worries me the most aren’t DDoS attacks that can be mitigated and, at worst, might keep us down for some time, but exploits. Especially related to Scrypto! The fact that Scrypto is easy to use, simpler, and less prone to exploits is exactly what RDX Works has been advertising it as, and if we were to get exploited during Babylon or later, it might hurt us a lot.

I’m less worried about forking and clones: others could do that but they would be behind Radix regarding technology and market adoption; with all the R&D done in the years I really hope others won’t be able to have a better product than us, before us. Even if they did, they would have to fight for market adoption just like all the clones had to (Cash, Classic, 2.0, Gold, etc…)

I’m not even sure if Radix has a bounty program for white hat hackers; it’s a must nowadays!

51

What worries me most is time. Development seems quite slow. Don’t stare too much on doing things the right way when others are chasing you. Radix claims to have the trilemma solved, but a lot of newcomers are claiming that. It would be best if they speed up development by half a year or so.

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