Watch out Solidity: New project aims to tackle downsides of coding DeFi projects

Developers in the DeFi space are currently confronted with a terrible choice: Build something quickly and risk losing people’s money, or write bug-free Solidity code that takes time — meaning they miss market opportunities.
With Solidity developers now spending up to 90% of their time securing code and only 10% being creative, a blockchain project says the DeFi world deserves better, and is promising to deliver a way to create DApps quickly and securely.
The Radix Engine uses a new programming language called Scrypto — and the team behind this initiative say their smart contracts run on the same logic that mission-critical systems such as nuclear power stations use.
Conditional finite state machines are organized into components that can easily be assembled together — in a way that’s not too dissimilar to Lego. While each one is strong and complete on its own, they are also designed to fit together.
For the team behind Radix, the difference between its approach and Solidity’s is like night and day. They put it this way: Would you prefer to build with clay, or a box of Lego?
Making DeFi competitive with traditional finance
According to Radix, building applications in the DeFi space right now is fundamentally insecure. The project cites figures that show there have been exploits and hacks worth more than $285 million in the past two years — and understandably, this makes even the most ardent crypto enthusiasts reluctant to part with their cash.
The project said: “At Radix, we recognize the power of the individual developer. Better components build better projects. Better projects attract more users. More users bring more transactions.”
When it comes to the Lego-like components that make its platform so easy to use, Radix says developers can depend upon an ever-expanding catalogue of secure components. They can also build their own components if they prefer — and receive a royalty every time someone else uses it.
Over time, Radix wants to make DeFi competitive with traditional finance, and fundamentally revolutionize the way people interact with money. “Community-built coding libraries, tools and standards might seem small individually, but collectively they’re the bedrock of all successful open source projects,” it says.
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Scaling new heights
And beyond the issues surrounding security, there’s another elephant in the room that hasn’t been discussed yet: Scalability. Radix has been designed to ensure that it can step up to meet demands during busy times — a stark contrast to Ethereum, which continues to groan under the weight of congestion, with transaction fees continually breaking new highs.
Radix argues that the sharding techniques used by the likes of Eth2 and Polkadot “breaks one of the very things that makes DeFi special: The ability to compose together lots of DeFi applications.”
In response, its platform is being built to deliver scalability and cross-shard composability — creating an environment “where billions of DeFi users and millions of DeFi apps could work together seamlessly.” A mathematically proven consensus algorithm called Cerberus is at the beating heart of this proposition.
Radix has entered into a number of partnerships that enrich its offering. Last October, it started working with Quantstamp, a security auditing service that delivers decentralized, market-driven smart contract insurance.
Also that month, Radix announced that it had raised $12.7 million to support the growth, decentralization and development of its platform — receiving contributions from 652 participants in 67 countries.
Looking ahead, the XRD token is scheduled to launch by the end of this quarter — and an unsharded form of its consensus algorithm Cerberus is set to launch, complete with capacity for more than 50 transactions per second, the first step on their roadmap to unlimited DeFi scalability. Their new DeFi programming language, Scrypto, will arrive later in 2021 as the first iteration of Radix Engine v2 emerges.
Learn more about Radix
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