Benzinga - It has now been three years since “DeFi summer” took the world by storm, resulting in networks like Ethereum struggling to keep up with demand, and promising a new era of financial inclusivity to millions around the world. Today, that dream would seem to be further away than back then despite the crypto market’s capitalization being now almost six times as high. The root cause is that the DeFi user experience and developer experience is still only good enough for hardcore adopters. However, with the help of projects like Radix, DeFi could soon solve its UX and DevX conundrum, become an actual alternative to traditional finance.
DeFi, which stands for Decentralized Finance, is a suite of products and services based on distributed ledgers like blockchain that seeks to put control of financial systems in the hands of its users. By automating the entirety of the processing through code known as “smart contracts”, DeFi removes intermediaries. This means that under the right circumstances, those using DeFi services or products don’t need to trust the good faith or competence of financial institutions.
The reasons behind the previous “under the right circumstances” are the multiple challenges that DeFi has faced since its inception. As a relatively new technology and approach to finance, there are still many factors that are being figured out, which has prevented DeFi from reaching mass adoption. Of these challenges, ease of use and development are probably the most important as they make it difficult to attract and maintain new users.
While the difficulty of using and developing DeFi products is partly caused by the technical nature of the technology, the lack of DeFi-oriented infrastructure is also to blame. While networks like Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain have gained great popularity and serve the needs of DeFi, they were not designed with DeFi in mind. This was the problem that led the team behind Radix to completely re-engineer the concept of smart contracts for their upcoming Babylon Mainnet upgrade, scheduled for September 2023.
Self-described as the “full stack for DeFi”, Radix is a layer 1 smart contract platform that offers DeFi developers everything they need to build their DeFi projects, and offers end users a radically better user experience. As the whole Radix stack was designed with the goal of a vastly better user experience and developer experience, it seamlessly integrates consensus, virtual machine, programming language, and wallet to offer the best experience. In the same way that Apple had to build its own seamlessly integrated stack of custom silicon, hardware, iOS and App Store to offer the iPhone experience, so too has Radix taken this same approach to create the “iPhone” moment for Web3.
In addition to making it easier for developers to build secure, fast, and scalable decentralized financial tools, Radix also makes it easier for the end user to interact with them. An example of how Radix is reimagining its native wallet that incorporates network-level features such as Smart Accounts, Personas, Radix Connect, Native Assets, and the Transaction Manifests.
While the technical how-to behind the upcoming upgrade can be overwhelming to most users, it really isn’t necessary to understand and take advantage of the benefits it will bring. This, of course, is the whole point of allowing everyday users to actually use and benefit from DeFi tools.
So what exactly are the benefits of Radix’s upcoming wallet? Well, the most important is the removal of seed phrases through smart accounts, which simplifies the overwhelming wallet creation and recovery process DeFi is known for. The upgrade also introduces an authentication mechanism known as Personas, which allows web3 users to actually create digital identities without having to provide their financial information to third parties. Radix Connect is all about making it more convenient to connect your mobile app to desktop experience for DeFi applications, while Native Assets and Transaction Manifests are about putting users in total control of their assets and transactions.
With the launch of these features in September, Radix will give users an experience that is much closer to what they are used to with their favorite web2 apps or their bank accounts, all without sacrificing the benefits of blockchain and crypto. This same philosophy is ingrained in all of Radix’s tech stack, creating a new “Asset-Oriented Blockchain” paradigm that is just what the crypto community has been waiting for.
To learn more about the Radix Full Stack, be sure to check out the Radix Full Stack website.
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