Radix ($XRD) – The Radix DLT Crypto Wiki

What is Radix?

Radix [ /rædɪks/ ] (Native asset: $XRD; sign: √ ) is a full-stack, decentralized finance (DeFi) layer-1 (L1) protocol founded by Dan Hughes.

An associated cryptocurrency was launched in November 2020 as a price-vested ERC-20 token ($eXRD) on the Ethereum network. $eXRD was superseded by native $XRD in July 2021 with the launch of Radix’s Olympia Mainnet.

Radix has been designed to address the requirements of DeFi, including fast, parallel consensus, decentralized applications, & atomic composability.

Current State

The live network is Babylon. Running since September 2023, it is a full smart-contract Layer 1 built on the asset-oriented Radix Engine, with consensus by Cerberus in a single, unsharded shard group – a variant of the original HotStuff BFT.

The project is now community-run. Across 2026 the Radix Foundation moved to maintenance mode and handed day-to-day stewardship to an elected Radix Accountability Council, as the network completes its shift from a Foundation-subsidised chain to a fee-driven one.

The frontier is Hyperscale. A Foundation public test sustained 500,000+ transactions per second across 128 shards on commodity hardware. hyperscale-rs, a community Rust implementation that discards most of that design, finished its first Radix-funded milestone on 7 August 2026. On 3 September its lead developer withdrew from further Radix grants; the code stays open for Radix to adopt, and no date is set for Xi’an, the planned upgrade that would bring sharding to production.

Latest News

• 6 November: HM Revenue & Customs, the UK tax authority, gave notice that the High Court in London will hear its petition to wind up RDX Works on 18 November. RDX Works is the dormant UK company that built Radix until development moved to the Radix Foundation in 2025.

• 4 November: 360,851 hUSDC was refunded to 79 accounts whose USDC had been stuck in the Hyperlane bridge since the August asset drain.

• 31 October: the Radix Accountability Council disclosed that Radix DAO LLC, the DAO's legal company, was incorporated in the Marshall Islands on 9 October. The Foundation has committed about 2.7bn $XRD and 100k USD in stablecoins to it as a grant, which has not yet been transferred.

• 28 October: hyperscale-rs, the community's Rust implementation of a sharded Radix network, replaced its network layer with iroh, a library that connects nodes directly even behind home routers.

• 27 October: one transaction took 1.14m $XRD from a first-version Flex Pool on Ociswap, using a flash loan, a loan borrowed and repaid inside the same transaction. Later pool versions are not affected (Ociswap Flex Pool exploit).

• Exchanges: MEXC has placed its XRD/USDT market under Assessment, a 30-day review that can end in delisting; spot trading stays open (How to Buy $XRD).

• Until 13 November: candidacy is open for the Permanent RAC, the DAO's first elected council.

Each week in full: Radix Week in Review.

Architecture

Development History

Main article: History of Radix

Since the Radix Production Network (RPN) naming convention was dropped, all releases have been named after wonders of the ancient world, expanded beyond the traditional Seven Wonders to include Xi’an, a city in China where the Terracotta Army was found.

Pre-Mainnet Research

A test on a 2019 implementation called Tempo achieved over 1.4m tps on 1187 nodes.

Cassandra, a 2021 research network led by Dan Hughes, tested how a sharded network could keep running when some of its validators stop, and how validator sets could be rearranged when they do.

Olympia (July 2021)

Main article: Radix Mainnet (Olympia)

Olympia was the first Radix Mainnet. It was released on the 28th of July, 2021 and was the first implementation of the Radix Engine execution environment, the Cerberus consensus protocol, and the native $XRD token.

Alexandria (December 2021)

Main article: Radix Developer Environment (Alexandria)

Alexandria was a major upgrade that occurred during December 2021 that provided preliminary tools for building blueprints and components using the Scrypto language.

Babylon (live)

Main article: Radix Mainnet (Babylon)

The Babylon release debuted blueprints and components / smart contracts, allowing true decentralized apps (dApps) on Radix.

On 3 December 2023, Babylon suffered its first major outage – an ~11.5-hour halt from a boundary-condition bug, during which safety held: consensus paused and no transactions or funds were lost.

Babylon halted again from 31 August to 11 September 2026, after someone used a bug in the Radix Engine to take bridged assets, wrapped copies of tokens from other blockchains, out of accounts they did not own (Hyperlane Asset Drain and Network Halt). It restarted on 11 September with the Eagle Ray protocol update.

Passing of Dan Hughes (July 2025)

Main article: Dan Hughes

On 27 July 2025, Radix founder Dan Hughes passed away unexpectedly from natural causes at his home. In the months prior, Dan had been leading the Hyperscale testing efforts and was deeply engaged in driving Radix forward.

To ensure continuity, Adam Simmons (Chief Strategy Officer) and Jonathan Day (Finance Director) joined Andy Jarrett (CEO) as Directors of the Radix Foundation.

Xi’an

Main article: Radix Mainnet (Xi’an)

Xi’an is the planned upgrade that would bring sharded consensus to production, so that throughput grows with the number of nodes. Dan Hughes designed it around Cerberus consensus and a fixed shard space of 2^256 shards served by shard groups. hyperscale-rs, the leading candidate, departs from that design: its per-shard consensus derives from HotStuff-2, and its shards can split and merge while the network runs.

Hyperscale (2026)

In January 2026, the Radix Foundation completed a landmark public test of the fully sharded Hyperscale consensus, sustaining 500,000+ transactions per second with peaks above 700,000 TPS (above 800,000 in the Foundation’s 20 February closing post) across 128 shards on commodity hardware.

Following the completion of the interim Hyperscale phase in February 2026, the Foundation announced plans to open-source all code, documentation, and operational tooling. hyperscale-rs, a community Rust implementation led by flightofthefox, is the leading candidate for Xi’an, and in his words it “throws out almost all designs from both Cerberus and the original Hyperscale repo”. He took an 18-month RFC for delivering Xi’an to the governance forum in April 2026, and the Foundation funded Milestone 1, completed on 7 August 2026. On 3 September he withdrew from further Radix grants; the project continues as open source that Radix is free to adopt, with no dates set.

Governance Handover (2026)

In January–February 2026, the Radix community elected a 5-member Radix Accountability Council (RAC) to oversee the transition of operational responsibilities from the Foundation to the community. Over 1.34 billion XRD from 1,151 unique accounts participated in the vote. Voters elected Peachy, Faraz, Jazzer_9F, Avaunt and projectShift. Tadkis replaced Faraz in February 2026 and Alfred replaced Peachy, so the council coordinating the 2026 handover is Tadkis, Jazzer_9F, Avaunt, projectShift and Alfred.

The community also voted to phase out the validator subsidy with 71.6% support (over 1 billion XRD from 604 accounts). The subsidy was tapered from $350 a month in February and ended in June 2026, so validators now live on the fees they charge their delegators.

In parallel, the Foundation issued Requests for Proposals (RFPs) to decentralize three core infrastructure services it had previously operated: the Babylon Gateway (ledger data aggregation), the Signalling Server (wallet-to-dApp WebRTC connections), and the Connect Relay (encrypted message buffering between mobile browsers and wallets).

Resources

• RadixDLT Twitter 🔗

• RadixDLT YouTube 🔗

• How UK Fintech Startup Radix is Making Crypto Finance Accessible

• Complete Guide to Radix and the $XRD Token

• Coinmonks Industry Case Study: Radix

• RadixWorld