This blog went missing for a few months and I owe you an explanation. My list of DeFi projects on Polygon kept growing but there was a problem. Rug pulls and other scams were accelerating on other networks that relied primarily on Solidity programmers and it seemed to be only a matter of time before they would show up on Polygon. Reviewing my list it seemed that well over half of the new projects that I was considering writing about were more likely than not to be nascent rug pulls or scams. I decided not to participate in these kinds of rip offs and so I decided to hang back for awhile and see what developed. Sure enough most of the new DeFi projects on Polygon in late spring and early summer were cons. (Fortunately none of the ones that I had already covered went bad.)

What set off my spider sense about this situation? The old adage that "if it seems too good to be true it probably isn't" was a big part. Also most of the newer projects were very similar in nature to BSC projects that had turned out to be dishonest ventures. In a few cases I reviewed the actual code and it seemed to me that even if the initial intentions of the developers were basically honorable, they were leaving themselves with openings to change their minds later and abscond with the funds if the project didn't perform well.

Then to cap things off, there were reports that Polygon itself supports questionable administration powers that could be abused at any time. That means that even recommending the good projects on Polygon was wrought with risk as the whole ecosystem could get rugged. I found Polygon's answers to those concerns to be less than ideal and this caused me to extend my "timeout" on cheer leading Polygon-based DeFi.

The upshot is that I have pulled almost all of my funds out of polygon. Instead I am looking for the protocol that will come along and make DeFi safe for the average investor. Right now there is no such platform but I am betting on Radix to become that platform within the next year or so. Why Radix? You can get the general picture from a nice overview article such as this one. What I like is the programming model and so I will cover that in some detail in the months ahead. The bottom line is that while code audits for Solidity projects cost up to a million dollars and still regularly overlook hacks, the Radix model based on Scrypto should be much easier to code and review making it possible to know exactly what you are getting when you send your funds to a Radix smart contract.

So look for articles from me in the weeks ahead covering asset-oriented programming, design by contract, functional programming, blueprints, components and more as we look forward to the official release of the Scrypto language and the Radix developers toolset in Q4, 2021.

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