Stabledash Live · · 13 min

Radius Mainnet Launch, Stablecoin Micropayments, and Monetizing the Internet

With Robert Bench, Radius

Key takeaways

  • Radius Core went live at A Very Stable Conference with no token, charging a hundredth of a penny per transfer, and Bench credits Lightspeed with backing the idea.

  • Bench argues that token incentive models break down at the millions of transactions per second that machine-to-machine commerce will need.

  • Brale handles fiat on and off ramps, SBC is the stablecoin partner and Privy provides wallets for the launch.

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Summary

After four years of building, Radius CEO Robert Bench says a tokenless stablecoin network can let machines pay each other at internet scale.

Radius has launched Radius Core on mainnet at A Very Stable Conference, after four years of work on the code base. The network has no token and charges a hundredth of a penny to move money, says CEO Robert Bench, who points to Aaron at Lightspeed as the investor who backed the idea.

Who built it

Bench calls Radius Core a team effort that drew on Bitcoin Core developers, the founder of Zcash, people who built USDC and the team that built the Federal Reserve's central bank digital currency code. He says the starting question in 2022 was whether stablecoin network architecture could be restructured around linear scalability in both performance and cost.

“The fact that our Internet is still run on advertising is kind of nuts. Right? It's still it's still running on an advertising market for everything we do. We think it can be run on money, on real value, as long as you make it fast and cheap enough.”
Robert Bench

Why no token

Bench says the token incentive model makes things "a little janky" once you aim for millions of transactions a second. If machines transact with other machines, he argues, human latency leaves the loop and capacity needs move past 1,000 or 10,000 TPS to "seven or eight figures."

Monetizing the internet

As an example, Bench says Cloudflare handles 80 to 200 million events per second that could in principle be charged for but are not, because money cannot move that fast. He says most of the world's goods and services are not monetizable today because buying them costs too much.

He calls it "kind of nuts" that the internet still runs on advertising, and says it could run on real value if payments are fast and cheap enough. Radius charges a hundredth of a penny now, and Bench says "we know we can go lower."

Launch partners

At launch, Brale handles moving fiat on and off the platform. Through Brale's partnership with SBC, users who deposit money receive SBC stablecoin. Privy, which Bench says has been a partner from day one, provides wallets.

Bench describes Radius Core as the filament in the light bulb, the small piece that makes the rest of the infrastructure work. He treats mainnet as "a starting line," and says the team has to keep improving every day "for the next thirty years."

Stripe, Cloudflare, Privy, and Circle come up most.

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