Piers Ridyard is the CEO of Radix, one of the world’s oldest digital currency companies. The project is on the verge of turning ten, and he believes many new opportunities and challenges are coming not only for his enterprise, but for the crypto industry in general.
Piers Ridyard Discusses His Crypto Journey
Discussing his early crypto days, he said:
I started in crypto when I started mining on the genesis block of Ethereum in early 2015, investing in ‘the DAO’ and going deep on everything from game theory to prediction markets. This eventually led me to build and exit Surematics, a Y combinator company that built decentralized deal room software for insurance companies in 2017… I became CEO of RDX Works… joining the founder, Dan Hughes, and building the team to over 75 people around the world. My background includes finance, law, electronics, and mathematics. I also have two degrees, one in Chinese and business and a second in law, as well as having achieved level 1 chartered financial analyst designation.
He was also quick to comment that Radix has brought a lot of unique blockchain solutions to the market. He stated:
Like Ethereum, Radix is a layer 1 smart contract platform, although Radix is as different to Ethereum as a jumbo jet is to a biplane. In a nutshell, Radix is the base layer upon which any developer can build dApps (decentralized applications) on top of. End users can use those dApps for services such as payments, borrowing, trading, or lending for any form of a digital asset such as tokens or NFTs. You can also use Radix for password-less login to any app or website that supports it without relying on any centralized service to hold your data. The Radix project is one of the origins of the crypto industry. It’ll be ten years next month. The reason it’s taken this long is that we had an end goal in mind and worked backwards from that objective. That objective is to build a decentralized ledger capable of supporting mainstream-ready experiences for users, developers, and capital at the scale of the global financial system.
Connecting Everyone to the Blockchain
Discussing how his company connects both products and developers to the blockchain industry, Ridyard mentioned:
Radix is just software that anyone can run on their computer. When a computer runs that software and connects to others running that software, it forms a network, and we call those computers nodes. Those nodes, in turn, then agree with one another on the state of the Radix Ledger, which is an immutable record of transactions. The Radix Ledger can hold any kind of data, whether it’s who won a sports game for a decentralized prediction application, a record of who owns a token, or the smart contract logic that forms the basis of a dApp.
