Alexandria by CoinMarketCap takes a deep dive into Radicle (RAD) which claims to be a better alternative to GitHub and GitLab as an improved centralized code collaboration platform.
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The Value Proposition of Radicle (RAD)
During the previous decade, open-source software development became the standard. Sharing code freely and publicly has reduced the cost and complexity of producing software, resulting in a surge in IT innovation.
These technologies, which have become the industry standard for code sharing, also house the world's largest open-source development repositories, which include not just code but also bugs, pull requests, reviews, and comments. Furthermore, these platforms are where most social interactions, such as stars, likes, and following, take place.
Maintaining the stability and health of the free and open-source ecosystem is more critical than ever in a world where practically all software is built on open-source code. As a result, the team behind Radicle feels that relying on centrally hosted platforms and corporations to deliver critical open source infrastructure is unsustainable. The employment of such centralized services is incompatible with the goals of the free and open-source ecosystem, putting it at risk of extinction.
Radicle was invented as a stand-in. Its goal is to eliminate intermediaries and create a peer-to-peer ecosystem that is reliable, effective, and safe. To encourage the adoption of decentralized alternatives for code collaboration that conform to free and open-source software norms, an intentional shift in narrative is necessary.
How Does Radicle (RAD) Work?
Radicle was created with bazaar-style growth in mind. This signifies that each project has many upstreams maintained by maintainers and contributors who exchange changes with one another, rather than a single canonical view.
Two people will have subjective opinions on the same project, but your vision of the project will become the total of all other views of the project. Rather than being constrained to the supervision of a small set of individuals with read/write permission, the project becomes dispersed among the different perspectives of its maintainers and contributors.
In reality, this implies that you'll need to add other individuals to your project as remotes to retrieve and receive updates from contributors.
Radicle uses Ethereum for unique worldwide identities, decentralized organizations, and protocols that assist open-source maintainers keep their projects going.
Radicle Link, a peer-to-peer replication technology based on Git, powers the network. It adds peer-to-peer discovery to Git by spreading data through a mechanism known as gossip.
Network users exchange and distribute material that they are interested in by storing redundant copies locally and sharing, or replicating, their local data with chosen peers. Radicle Link uses Git's smart transfer protocol to maintain its data replication speed while providing worldwide decentralized repository storage via the peer-to-peer networking layer.
Developers can exchange and collaborate on Git repositories without depending on middlemen such as hosted servers because all data on the network is saved locally by peers on the network.
How Radicle Is Different From Both GitHub and GitLab?
Collaboration on Radicle differs differently from centralized code collaboration systems such as GitHub and GitLab, two of the biggest providers of Internet hosting for software development and version control. Radicle holds the edge over GitLab and GitHub in the following ways:
- Radicle is not an enterprise, but rather a community-owned and self-sustaining network. For example, the RAD token, which is built on Ethereum, is in charge of its own governance.
- The Radicle stack is open-source from beginning to end, which implies there are no "closed" components in this system. It also implies that the Radicle stack is completely auditable, modifiable, and extendable.
- Radicle is not set to be global by default. Instead, the content you see, interact with, and reproduce is governed by your social graph of peers and projects.
- Radicle was designed to encourage bazaar-style development which means that inside projects, there isn't a single master branch for contributors to merge into and peers instead preserve their unique project representations, which other peers can access and merge via patches.
- Radicle is built entirely on open protocols. "Special servers," privileged users, or companies have no control over your cooperation.
- Radicle employs a peer-to-peer architecture rather than a client-server model.
- Radicle is an Ethereum-based decentralized organization that replaces the Org functionality of centralized forges as well as their hierarchical administrative systems.
Unique Features of Radicle (RAD)
Radicle Link
Radicle Link is a peer-to-peer gossip protocol with a flexible distributed version control backend. Though its first implementation is focused on supporting Git, it aspires to be broad enough to be used on top of systems, like pijul or mercurial.
The protocol uses gossip-based replication to disperse Git repositories, allowing them to be hosted and shared without the use of centralized servers. On the Radicle network, repositories are referred to as projects.
Radicle Link enables a bazaar-style cooperation approach in which participants integrate into a plurality of upstreams through remotes rather than a single canonical 'master' branch.
A Peer-to-peer Code Collaborative Stack
The Radicle platform offers an opt-in registry based on Ethereum that maintains canonical project metadata to supplement the replication layer. This enables projects to store critical data like project status and repository heads with the assurance of global availability and immutability.
The three primary elements to stress include focusing on a peer-to-peer code collaboration model, building on the underlying distributed version control system for replication, and adopting a protocol-first approach.
There are many other features that are discussed in the official RAD whitepaper, here.
Radicle (RAD) Tokenomics
The total token supply of RAD tokens is 99,998,810, and the current circulating supply is set at 26,170,474.61 RAD.
Radicle (RAD) Price
Radicle (RAD) is now trading around $7.35 as of Jan. 19, 2022. Its 24-hour trading volume on exchanges is around $7,861,569.
Radicle (RAD) Price Prediction and Future Outlook
The current price of Radicle (RAD) is $7.35, which is around 72% less than its all-time high of $27.61. The RAD token experienced an all-time low at $3.79 just six months ago during the infamous crypto dump of May 2021. After that, it made a good recovery and went around $18 before coming down to $7.35. It must be noted that the largest cryptocurrency in the world, which is Bitcoin, dictates the market, and right now it is supposed to be in the recovery phase and highly volatile. Crypto experts believe that when BTC will show some strength, the entire crypto market will go up, including the RAD token which may break the $20 mark and even test its ATH, which currently stands at $27.61.