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I am currently writing a book about my journey to Radix and Scrypto but today I will answer the question I get a lot these days. How did you find out about Radix?
My journey with crypto goes all the way back to 2011 but contains significant gaps. Only during a wild period from late 2016 to late 2017 did I actively trade cryptocurrencies. Other than that I have been all about trying to understand the technology and see if it is far enough along that I feel ready to take the plunge into it as a full-time software developer. With over 40 years of experience I have the chops to contribute, but I am fussy and want good tools, good core tech and a project that is not only trying to accomplish something meaningful, but is on the track to succeed.
Without diving into the details I will just say that from the very beginning Ethereum and Solidity didn't do it for me. I have resisted that siren song to this day and it hasn't been particularly difficult to do so. For much of 2019 and 2020 I was into Ark and part of the attraction was that their multi-chain model didn't include smart contracts which I considered sketchy. The programming model was to build your business logic directly into your custom blockchain. I really liked this but the summer of DeFi, coupled with repeated delays in the Ark development roadmap, started to make me reexamine my assumptions. Then when Ark promoted a lawyer to CEO, that was the last straw. They seemed to lose the thread regarding the path to success which must include a strong element of building a successful cadre of professionals using and expanding upon your core technology.
So by late 2020 I was in search mode for a new crypto project to get involved with. I looked at a bunch and didn't see much that even warranted a deep dive and the deep dives that I did make all came up empty. I did make one discovery: Ivan on Tech. Finally here was a YouTube crypto trading geek who at least took on the world of crypto first and foremost with a programmer's mindset. Of course he used other factors to steer his trading strategy besides just technical merit, but that was fine. He wanted to be involved with a lot of growing projects. Me? I needed just one that could be the horse that I could really ride.
It was on January 2nd, 2021 that Ivan did 5 minutes on Radix. He talked primarily about scaling without losing atomic composability but also mentioned the novel idea that Radix floated for programming incentives via on-ledger royalties. That was enough to get me to do one more deep dive. This one came up positive. Ivan had, in fact, drastically undersold the Radix story. There was a lot more to like. There were also some major cautions including my concerns about the design of the planned Scrypto language, but I will save that story for another day.
Within about a month I decided to creep slowly into the space by starting a discord called "Rock's Functional Programming for Crypto Study Group". Despite the unwieldy name I manage to attract about 100 members pretty quickly. Even though I tried to get communities going behind Cardano and Zilliqa and other blockchains that sported functional languages, I only seemed to attract Radix enthusiasts.
Cut to today and that discord has been rebranded as the Rust & Scrypto Forum and now we have about 250 members who are all very much focused on the first public release of Scrypto that just occurred at the APE meetup. Since I have a small head start in terms of how Scrypto programming works, I am working hard to answer questions and get people rolling with the language.
If you have an interest in Scrypto and/or Rust, feel free to join us. Here is a permanent discord invite to the [Rust & Scrypto Forum]. The forum is free forever. Cheers!
