Crypto — RadixDLT: The role of community in decentralization. And it’s power!
Oi! I’m happy to be able to welcome you.
Hopefully you will feel the same after having read through this article as well.
So, what I would like to talk about in this article is the role and power of community in a crypto project. Let’s build up context first as to better understand and be able to frame the community aspects.
The emergence of the decentralization movement meant the swelling of the next wave of empowerment to more people. People that before were not able to do something could now do it.
This became possible due to advancements in several technological domains. The 2 most notable are: cryptography (for security) and consensus theory (for robustness).
The problem of trust was solved and this meant that the middle party enabling and supervising some kind of transaction between 2 parties was no longer necessary in some cases.
The middlemen were necessary due to the problem of trust between 2 (often unknown) parties.
The application that kickstarted this shift to decentralization was Bitcoin (digital money). Peer-to-peer value transfer without a party in the middle (i.e. a bank). This meant for example that I could make an international value transfer without going through the banking system. Circumventing the banking system meant circumventing its fees and the characteristics of its infrastructure (often slow processing of international transactions).
Without stepping into too much technical detail, a bit of clarification of what the key enabler was to this. A blockchain, the technology on which Bitcoin runs, is basically a distributed database. Copies are maintained by network participants (i.e. nodes). An entry in the database can only be written when a majority agrees on the validity (cfr. consensus). And then this entry is propogated everywhere in the network. A database containing financial transactions is called a ledger.
(Distributed ledgers can be built in different types of architecture of which blockchain was the first. Radix has iterated on many distributed ledger architectures to finally have research and developed their own technology, Cerberus.)
So, a role (1) we identified for the community is participation in network support. The more distributed the ledger is, the more decentralized validation and database entry is, and thus the more secure and robust the ledger and network is.
If a network is reliant on the nodes for security and robustness then this is a power (1) that is seated in community. Current systems are held and maintained by a big tech corporation or a bank or a government (i.e. a central party, matrix analogy: the One). You can view it as a spectrum with at the start maximum centralization and at the end maximum decentralization. This spectrum is shadowed (directly related) by a spectrum of where the power is located: The more centralized, the more power (control) is located at a central party.
And also shadowed (inversely related) by another spectrum of security and robustness: The more decentralized, the more secure/robust. The more centralized, the less secure/robust (cfr. point(s) of failure).
The next leap in vision was that this decentralization could be applied to software applications (decentralized applications, dapps). Simple peer-to-peer value transfer could become conditional peer-to-peer value transfer (i.e. programmable money). A contract as we know them now could become a digital contract (smart contract) and it would inherit all these benevolent characteristics we talked about before. This was first envisioned and strived after by Ethereum (programmable digital money).
Herein lies another power (2), a lot of existing services can become digitized and/or decentralized. For example most if not all legal activities a notary does can be done with smart contracts. The same goes for financial activities.
You can become an entity that lends to a person or organization (matrix analogy, you can become the One). Whereas this was reserved for institutions that had access to big capital. But a lot of small entities can pool together big capital to provide the same service. On top of existing services, new services can be built as well (cfr. market making done by orderbooks can now be done by constant function market makers like Uniswap).
A last power (3) I want to highlight is that the community (the users) decides in part (the other part are the applications that interact with each other) which network is valuable and which is less or isn’t at all. This is called a network effect.
“In economics, a network effect (also called network externality or demand-side economies of scale) is the phenomenon by which the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products. Network effects are typically positive, resulting in a given user deriving more value from a product as other users join the same network. The adoption of a product by an additional user can be broken into two effects: an increase in the value to all other users ( “total effect”) and also the enhancement of other non-users motivation for using the product (“marginal effect”). Network effects are most prevalent in new economy industries, particularly information and communication technologies.[1]”
If the community (user base) decides the value of a network then network (protocol) architects have to be sensitive to the needs of its community otherwise an exodus is likely rendering network value basically zero.
Therefore the community has influence in the course a public good like a public distributed ledger takes (cfr. governance). And that is why a role a good community member can take is to be a critical and active participant of the network.
I want to finish my article with some examples where it seems that Radix is very aware of this and is making efforts to be as transparent as possible to their community as to achieve as much inclusion as is healthy.
Example 1: Radvocates program (https://www.radixdlt.com/radvocates/)
Example 2: User feedback
In ‘The DeFi download’, a Radix produced podcast, there was an episode with Alex Wearn, the CEO of IDEX, in which Piers Ridyard, CEO of Radix, specifically asked about how they do user feedback at IDEX. Below an excerpt of the question posed. (Unfortunately I can not give timestamps as they are not displayed on the website on which I listened to it but you can roughly navigate to the piece with below image, hopefully.)
“Can you talk a little bit about how you actually gather user feedback? How you sort of run that feedback loop internally? … I would love to understand how you stay close to the user and make sure you are delivering what the user wants?”
Example 3: Regular public AMA sessions with Dan Hughes, founder and CTO of Radix
A very strong proof of transparency and community inclusion are the AMA sessions in the telegram channel. You can pose questions to the team by typing in a question in telegram prefixed with the AMA tag ‘#AMA’. This will then be picked up, usually bi-weekly depending on how busy the team is. You can check out the history of these AMA’s and you will notice that this is not some kind of new marketing trick but has been ongoing for a long time.
I would therefore advocate to jump in there or on discord and mingle regardless if you’re single as a critical and active community member. Our role is as vital as it is relevant due to the dependancy a network has on their user base (community).
I’m not wrapping this article up with a fancy sounding quote. The point of the article is to get you to thinking critically, so I’ll leave it up to you to think out one of your own. Just like you can investigate, put to the test and make up your mind about Radix.
Interested to know more? Want to join the discussion? Or ready to sign up as a decentralized application developer on top of Radix? Follow the breadcrumbs below:
Dev sign up form: https://radixdlt.typeform.com/to/JHBeokkZ
Telegram: https://t.me/radix_dlt
Website: https://www.radixdlt.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/radixdlt
