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Talk to Radicle Founder: Creating a "free" collaboration network for developers

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Radicle has just closed a $12 million funding round and launched its governance token RAD.

3 月 4 日，去中心化代码库 Radicle 的创始人之一 Eleftherios 做客律动 BlockBeats AMA 直播间，为大家介绍具有「去中心化 Github」之称的 Radicle。Radicle 在此前刚刚完成了 1200 万美元的融资，并且推出其治理代币 RAD。

The following is the text version of the AMA:

Host: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the Radicle project?

Eleftherios：Hey! Hello, everyone My name is Eleftherios, and I'm one of the founders of the Radicle project. I'm from Greece, and I was previously vice president of data science and engineering at SoundCloud for six and a half years.

Radicle is a project that Alexis Sellier and I created in early 2018. We've been working on encryption since 2016 and are very excited about the whole area. We realize that if this space is going to be as disruptive (disruptive) as it wants to be, then the world will need a new sovereign infrastructure for code collaboration because code will be the new frontier, yet most crypto projects are still heavily dependent on GitHub.

With this in mind, we created the Radicle project with two goals:

1. Develop a resilient collaboration infrastructure that respects user freedom and does not rely on trusted gatekeepers or corporate or government overlords.

Leverage the newly developed sovereign financial infrastructure (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Defi) to create new value streams for developers and grow the digital Commons.

Radicle is a new code collaboration network based entirely on open protocols. It is secure, autonomous, and designed with decentralized communities in mind.

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主持人：您是如何进入区块链行业的呢？为什么想要做 Radicle？

Eleftherios：The reason I got into crypto was "disintermediation". Many of us who joined Web-2.0 companies in the early 2010s had a similar vision of letting creators "own their own creative process" and collaborate on a peer-to-peer basis. While many Web 2.0 companies have succeeded commercially, they have failed in their basic mission. Creators are still "customers" rather than partners or co-owners, and the extortion of the past continues, only this time with a new middleman.

主持人：在不少人看来，Radicle 是去中心化版的 Github，那么 Radicle 和 GitHub 之间最大的区别是什么？建立去中心化的代码协作方式可以解决什么问题？

Eleftherios：对的。Radicle 是去中心化的，Github 的替代品，不过我个人更倾向于认为 Radicle 是去中心化社区的代码协作基础设施。

Radicle's peer-to-peer code collaboration stack enables decentralized protocols, applications, and organizations to develop software on a fully decentralized stack.

This issue and use cases are significant for most decentralized projects, as they rely on GitHub/GitLab to produce and distribute their code artifacts. 1. This leaves their code base and community vulnerable to censorship 2. Introducing insecure workflows in their code collaboration process c. Strive for decentralization by forcing "trusted" participants in the community to exist as administrators.

Radicle differs from GitHub in a number of ways:

Radicle is built entirely on open protocols. There is no "special server," privileged user, or company that controls your collaboration. Radicle is based on a point-to-point architecture rather than a client-server model. At the heart of this architecture, we designed a point-to-point system based on Git, the familiar version control system. The Radicle stack provides an Ethereum integration for global names, DAO-controlled buybacks, and some finacing-related protocols. For developers, it is the gateway to the world of Ethereum, opening up many new experiences that would not be possible today.

Finally, the Radicle stack is open source from top to bottom. There are no "closed" components. Each component of the root stack is auditable, modifiable, and extensible, and is designed with security and cryptography in mind.

Host: Radicle recently launched RAD as a governance token, so can you tell us more about what RAD tokens are used for?

Eleftherios：RAD is the governance token for the Radicle network. It is based on the Compound Governor Alpha and has complete control over all Radicle smart contracts, including Radicle's Treasury, which holds over 50% of the network tokens.

Radicle's economic model lets users pay when they interact with some Etherium-based protocol, but members (token holders) get a discount. By buying (or getting rewards) and holding a certain number of tokens, users can avoid (or discount) fees and participate in network governance.

主持人：数据显示 Radicle 之中已经有 1200 多个项目了，可不可以分享一些让您印象深刻的项目？

There are over 1,300 of them and they're growing fast, about 10% a week. There are a number of teams and projects experimenting with the Radicle network. Some COINS of the core project maintainers to try to use, and in one of their twitter posts https://laanwj.github.io/2021/01/21/decentralize.html Radicle are contained in the network. It's a big moment for us, because Bitcoin is the reason we started paying attention to this space. In addition, this post, there are some content: https://twitter.com/abbey_titcomb/status/1336273223219109888

主持人：目前开发者参与程度是怎样的？普通用户是否也可以参与 Radicle 呢？

Eleftherios：Yes, anyone can participate in the development of the Radicle. In fact, we've had a lot of contributions from non-core team members.

主持人：Radicle 最近发起了 Seeders 计划，能简单向我们介绍一下么？

Eleftherios：The Seeders project was designed by us to progressively decentralize the governance of the network and to foster a healthy community of early contributors who can "lead" the governance of the network.

Current participants include participants from Aave, Synthetix, Uniswap, Gnosis Safe, The Graph, Gitcoin, DXDAO, Neubilistic, The Interchain Foundation, Dorg, Curve Labs, Cervical Network, Innocent Systems, Vega Protocol, The CELO Foundation, Fleek, Status, CoinMarketCap, The Web3 Foundation and more.

We are planning to slowly open it up so that in the future there will be more opportunities for more people to participate.

主持人：当前 Radicle 使用的是以太坊，但众所周知近期以太坊受到高 Gas 等问题的困扰，我们知道团队有也在考虑 Layer 2 和其他解决方案，目前计划如何解决性能问题？

Eleftherios：RAD is indeed an ERC20 token.

Having said that, it is important to note here that you do not need RAD tokens to use the network. Users go to radicle.xyz to download the application and can start using the peer-to-peer network for free without having to interact with the blockchain. They only interact with the blockchain to get specific experiences provided by Ethereum, such as global names, Radicle organization, and financing protocols.

I think the moderator raised exactly the right question about the cost of Ethereum. This is a big problem at the moment and it damages people's access to space because people can't afford to pay such high transaction fees. While the Layer 2 solution is progressing quickly, we are also keeping a close eye on projects like Optimism and Matter Labs.

主持人：Radicle 使用 DeFi 平台 Balancer 的 LBP 来分发代币，未来 Radicle 会和 DeFi 甚至 NFT 领域有更多的结合吗?

Eleftherios：Of course! It's interesting to watch, and in many ways it's a natural next step for the crypto space. I have been keeping a close eye on both categories and trying to learn from all the experiments that are taking place and use them for our own tasks.

For example, all of our grant-related experience, behind the scenes, relied on the Universal Grants or DEFI protocol that we designed. We develop them as protocols, but we also integrate them end-to-end into the application so that users can have a pleasant user experience.

The NFT space is also very exciting. We don't have any official plans for this yet, but we have a lot of ideas for how to access tokens or NFT, so stay tuned for our actions over the next few months.

主持人：当前 Radicle 用户的代码数据都储存在哪里呢？有没有使用 IPFS 或者 Arweave 这些 Web3.0 存储应用的可能性呢？

Eleftherios：They are stored in a peer-to-peer storage network that we have created based on Git. We call it Radicle-Link.

The network extends Git with a gossip layer, so you can take advantage of Git's intelligent transport protocol, while also having a social collaboration model similar to GitHub's open source model. With regard to IPFS and Arweave, the two networks are complementary, so you can imagine that someone would use them for different reasons.

主持人：Radicle 的未来发展计划是怎样的？

Eleftherios：There's a lot of excitement in our work. Although the Radicle network has over 1,300 projects and is growing rapidly, Radicle is still in beta and under active development.

We are currently working on some of the things that you will see in applications in the near future, such as "merge requests", performance and reliability improvements to our peer-to-peer network, and the introduction of our Etherium-based protocol in applications.