Working Backwards from the Solution

"You can't make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you see yourself exactly as you are now.  As soon as you do that, changes will flow naturally."   – Henepola Gunaratana

We live in an incremental world.  Take nearly any industry, and the improvements made are small, steady changes that make things a little better, faster, or cheaper.  And for the most part, this is fine.  We see it with academic research, manufacturing processes, product design, and more.  We see it with infrastructure as well, which is why the vast majority of roads, bridges, and tunnels all look very similar (with the rare aesthetic flair).  "On the shoulders of giants" is the phrase sometimes used to describe this phenomenon.  We see what others have done, make a small change that moves the industry forward just a little bit, and repeat.

One exception to this is with new industries.  When there are no giants to stand on, any move you make becomes radical in its own right.  With blockchain we saw this over the last decade, with Bitcoin revolutionizing the concept of money, then Ethereum (and a handful of others) revolutionizing the ability for blockchain to move beyond just currency.  We've seen a few other large steps of innovation within the industry like moving away from Proof of Work, using zero knowledge methods for information security, and hammering on the use of NFTs for—well, for just about anything you can imagine.

This has led the industry a long way, but 2022 has seen a noticeable slowing of big news stories discussing big, innovative changes.  Granted, you will still see the words "revolutionary", "innovation", "radical", or "(insert idea here) Killer".  The difference is, the hype factor is trying to energize incremental stories.  At the risk of using an imperfect metaphor, the revolution of blockchain is like imagining an ocean, then building an aquarium.  Compared to nothing, the aquarium is amazing, and you can see the similarities between it and an ocean environment.  That was a big improvement.  But then the "innovations" all deal with making the aquarium more efficient, adding decorations, adding new creatures.  But at the end of the day, you are still bound by four walls.  I believe this is the current state of blockchain.  Granted, it's a pretty big aquarium.  But it's not the ocean, and won't be until we start expanding the four walls in a way that cannot be done incrementally.

The Four Walls

So what are these four walls keeping the blockchain industry contained?  The Radix team has been working on this question for nearly a decade, and it's interesting to listen to what they've discovered.

The idea for Radix began ten years ago when founder Dan Hughes had a curious insight:  Bitcoin was an innovation that could change the world, but it was lacking the correct architecture to support the massive $400 trillion dollars that is the global financial system.  Instead of looking for incremental opportunities on current blockchain platforms, he reversed the equation and asked:  If you could build a foundational system that is a global, decentralized, easily developed, public, and infinitely scalable—what would that system look like?  To build it, there could be zero compromises on speed, cost, or programmability.  "Infinitely scalable" is not just a dream, it's a core requirement.

Obviously, a grand vision like that can hardly be accomplished overnight.  But at least the right questions were being asked.  If you accept the current limitations of the system, then you aren't doing anything to explain those aquarium walls.  You can call it an ocean all you want, but you will be fooling yourself.  Hughes, and eventually the Radix team, continued working backwards from this grand vision, trying to develop the system it would take to make this happen.  Over the course of this development, they hit system limitations five times.  Instead of accepting the limitations and doing what they could, they scrapped everything, backed up, and started over.  This sort of radical behavior, if unchecked, can bankrupt an organization before it even takes off.  However, if you start with the vision, then back up to what needs to be done—then there is no room to compromise.

By some miracle (actually, a team of equally-driven fanatics working for years), they believe they have not only identified the four walls, but have found the key to unlocking the blockchain ocean.

As stated in the platform's whitepaper, these four key limitations (and solutions) are:

• Complexity of the smart contract paradigm. The smart contract design of most chains is incredibly complicated, leaving only a handful of people who can competently and efficiently develop code.  This leaves a lot of code that is inefficient, flawed, and is not secure.  By changing the structure of the programming language to be asset-oriented, the most common elements of the blockchain architecture can be built and replicated easily.
• Standalone, non-modular smart contracts. Building upon the first barrier, the fact that the programming is incredibly difficult is only part of the issue.  It is also notoriously difficult to build in a modular way, getting multiple uses out of code snippets.  In order to solve this, there should be a library of code "chunks" that cover common situations and can be deployed in a copy/paste fashion.
• Economics that prevent knowledge sharing. There are several ways to spur large scale growth in a system.  First, encourage an "open source" philosophy; or to pay people for their work if you use it.  Currently the environment is highly competitive, first/fast mover, and sharing simply isn't an option.  Open source is nice, but the royalty based approach spurs even more growth because it allows the best code to rise to the top, and also creates a new market for those who want to develop but don't want to launch their own platform.
• Infinite Scalability. There are not any major chains that allow for infinite scalability; this is a major red flag, because if this blockchain aquarium ever wants to become an ocean, infinite scalability is a must.  This could be the most difficult part of the entire system, but the solution lies in methods that create atomic composability.  This allows the burden of computation to be split and reassembled, infinitely, without compromising the integrity of the data or the speed of the transactions.

The Road Ahead

In order to make blockchain the endless, unlimited ocean we all want it to be, we are going to have to break down these restrictions, even if it means radical change.  For Radix, this is obvious, and perhaps there are other teams coming to the same conclusion and working to make a difference.  One thing is promising, however.  As long as there are teams willing to toss our years of work and start over—because what we have won't get us to a true global financial economy—we will eventually get there.  This type of dedication and single focus approach is rare, extreme—and exactly what we need.