Layer 1 developer Radix reaches $400 million valuation in new token round

Radix, a Layer 1 blockchain network that claims to provide a “radically” better developer and user experience, said Thursday it reached a $400 million valuation in a new $10 million funding round.

The token round was entirely backed by DWF Labs, Radix CEO Piers Ridyard told The Block in an interview. He said DWF had already provided $8 million in funding, and the remaining $2 million will be given in the near future.

DWF has been buying Radix’s XRD tokens since last December on a daily basis from Radix Tokens (Jersey), the token issuing unit of Radix, Ridyard said. He declined to comment on DWF’s token-unlocking schedule.

DWF, a web3 investment firm and market maker, has recently become an active backer of token projects, investing in over 15 projects including Conflux, Orbs, Synthetix and Onomy Protocol. Ridyard said DWF became interested in Radix’s technology stack and mission after the launch of its RadFi platform in December.

What is Radix?

Radix started in 2013 as a blockchain research project. It was established as a company in 2017 and has been under development since then.

Ridyard said it took almost ten years to build the project as Radix did not want to copy existing technologies. “Radix has its own consensus system, its own execution environment and its own programing language,” he said.

Ridyard said that Radix’s programing language, Scrypto, is “massively easier” for new developers to build smart contracts than Ethereum’s Solidity language. “This is how we compete” against all other blockchain networks, he said. “We compete by not trying to onboard a tiny pool of highly competent smart contract developers that are incredibly expensive, but by trying to empower over 25 million developers worldwide to build the future of finance.”

Babylon mainnet launch 

Radix is expected to launch its mainnet dubbed Babylon in the second quarter of this year, which will allow developers to build smart contracts and applications on top of it. More than 50 projects have already committed to build on Radix, said Ridyard, adding that these projects range from DeFi protocols to NFT marketplaces.

The Babylon mainnet will follow its Olympia mainnet that launched in July 2021 as a public network with the XRD token. Olympia only allowed users to create, transfer and stake tokens on the network. Babylon is the final release of Radix’s technology stack.

Radix’s new funding round comes nearly two years after it raised $12.7 million in 2021 in a token round, said Ridyard. Before that, between 2013 and 2017, when Radix was in the research phase, it collected 3,000 bitcoin (worth nearly $82 million at today’s prices) from the community and then issued XRD tokens to the community in 2021, said Ridyard.

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