Why These DeFi Hacks Won’t Happen on Radix

The biggest problem that DeFi faces today is security. Last year alone, over three billion dollars was stolen by hackers from DeFi projects all over the world.

The ironic thing about these hacks is that DeFi was built to be a more secure financial system. DeFi protocols were meant to be safer than bank accounts and were meant to be more secure than just keeping one's money in a physical wallet.

However, that promise of security has gone unfulfilled despite the inherent security of decentralized networks. The reason for this disconnect between the principles behind decentralization and these hacks is simple; security doesn't just come from decentralization. It depends on a good user experience and developer experience.

For example, DeFi today is built on platforms (such as Ethereum) that force poor experiences on their users, like blind signing. DeFi today is also built using programming languages (such as Solidity) that require the developer to build everything themselves. It’s like building a computer game or spreadsheet from scratch without the benefit of Unreal Engine or Excel. This makes dApps very complex to build which results in mistakes and ultimately hacks.

The thing about this complexity is that it's not a principle of Web 3.0. While a lot of networks these days are needlessly complex — especially on the backend — there is proof that a simpler, more intuitive network can be built.

The Solution To Hacks

Over the past few years, people have tried to solve the security problem of DeFi through secondary means. They've tried educating users, they've tried building third-party solutions that check for fraud, and they've even tried running fraud detection as a service.

However, none of those solutions can ever work, because the problem isn't with human behaviors. The problem is with the network.

That's why hacks will continue to be rampant on these networks until there's something new to change them — until there's something radically different.

Radix

Radix is a radically different decentralized network that looks to completely change what it means to build and work in Web 3.0. And the network seeks to do that by making DeFi safe for everyone first.

The builders of Radix understand that there's no innovation or progress in DeFi if it isn't a safe and secure place to build. That's precisely why Radix is the fastest and safest place for DeFi apps to grow.

The safety problem is one that the Radix team has dedicated a lot of time to solving. Today, developers spend almost all their time making sure their dApp is safe for deployment. This takes a lot of time and essentially means that they cannot optimize their time for truly innovative projects.

The reason why developers have to go through this is not that decentralized networks are unsafe, or because the developers are bad. It's because the networks they build on aren't optimized for safety.

The Radix Engine, the execution environment of the Radix network, changes all of this. The network ensures that asset management isn't some cumbersome bag of code that has to be precisely balanced by the developer.

DApps developed to run on Radix will have intuitive asset management — on the backend — baked right into the network itself. The Scrypto language, which is the tool for building dApps on Radix, was specifically created for this purpose. Assets are a native function of the Radix platform, and the Scrypto language was specifically designed with that in mind. What this means in practice is that assets can behave like physical resources on the Radix ledger.

Developers who use the Scrypto language to build their dApps will not have to create a complicated web of smart contract messaging to transfer assets, as with platforms like Ethereum. They can simply do it intuitively — like moving object X from point A to B.

In the end, this creates dApps that are not only simple to build but also extremely safe. Since there are no webs of intricate smart contract messaging complexities, there's less for hackers to leverage to hack the network.

Hackers don't only leverage the complexities on the backend of crypto assets to hack DeFi apps. They also leverage the buggy and complex UX to accomplish the same nefarious tasks. The annoying thing about the awful UX that DeFi apps are deployed with is that they've hardly improved.

The same issues that people complained about five years ago — unintuitive functionalities, multiple complex steps to achieve a simple goal, meaningless crypto jargon, and smart contract complexities — are still present in DeFi dApps today. It's almost like there has been no progress in making DeFi accessible to the common person in five years.

The fault for this doesn't lie with other developers of these dApps. Developers aren't just making dApps with bad UX because they feel like it. A lot of these issues are rooted in real technical problems that only a new kind of network can solve. That's why all crypto dApps — from the ones built by million-dollar companies to the ones built by billion-dollar companies — all have the same problem. It isn't the dApp, it's the network limitations.

Removing those limitations means building a new network that bakes the solution to these problems into its very architecture. That's precisely what Radix does. Radix has built a network that is designed specifically for global mainstream use. The goal is to give people a truly decentralized app that's also usable.

The solution Radix has proposed required not just building a new wallet for users, but building a new network to interact with that new wallet. The result is a full stack that dramatically improves the quality of the UX users have. For example, the Radix full-stack makes it possible for users to have multifactorial control over their assets without using the all-important seed phrase.

The most important effect of this dramatically improved UX design is that social engineering hacks simply lose their effectiveness. Better UX simply makes it harder for people to be tricked into jeopardizing their accounts.

In the end, Radix is not only making accounts safer, but it's also employing a radically different approach to building in DeFi. This ensures that many of the hacks that have plagued DeFi so far won't happen on Radix.

Watch the RadFi keynote to learn more about how Radix dramatically improves the developer and user experience to reduce DeFi hacks today.