Radix Wiki
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🔔 Status :: 2022/07/25 : Footnote links are currently broken. Working on a fix.
Radix DLT
Radix📍 is a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol and cryptocurrency invented in 2013 by Dan Hughes📍. It was launched on November 17th, 2020 as a price-vested ERC20 token on the Ethereum network📍. Radix has been designed to address the requirements of DeFi, including smart contract capabilities, fast consensus & composability. A 2-page summary of the protocol is available here.
Architecture
The Radix 'universe', once deployed, will exist upon a fixed space of 2^256 data shards📍, served by a distributed network of validators, with shard space allocated according to processing power, storage and bandwidth. A fixed ledger space allows wallet addresses to be deterministically mapped to a shard and, hence, for the global state of the network to be a derived sum of shard states.
Events such as messages or transactions on the network are known as 'atoms', themselves composed of 'particles', which exist on shards.
Consensus Mechanism
Radix's unique consensus mechanism is called Cerberus📍. It will allow an effectively unlimited number of shards to operate independently without losing atomic composability. No other consensus mechanism has been announced that shares this ambitious goal. The Cassandra testnet is used to stress test Cerebus.
An unsharded version of Cerebus has been operating on the Radix mainnet for over 1 year. Sybil protection is achieved by Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS).
Staking API: 9.60%
Staked amount: $196.8M as of 8/18/2022.
Ecosystem Summary
80,000+ unique wallets.
550+ registered token types.
Four token exchanges and a trade aggregator encompass 50+ liquidity pools.
50+ active NFT projects and 2 automated NFT marketplaces.
Token Economics
Radix's token issuance is in two distinct stages📍: first, as e-Radix, an ERC20 token (ticker: $EXRD) on the Ethereum network. This commenced on the 17th November 2020 and is now closed. Second, as Radix Public Network 1 (RPN1), where the unlocked $EXRD erc20 tokens are burned in exchange for native $XRD tokens on the Radix network.
Stage 1 will see a total of 4.41bn $EXRD unlocked as increasing price milestones are met and held for 7 days.
Stage 2 will initially add 5.19bn $XRD followed by a 300m yearly emission up to a maximum of 12bn emitted over a 40 year period. There will be an additional 2.4bn fixed allocation to a Stable Coin Reserve.
Radix Roadmap (Summary)
The Radix mainnet is live. (Full roadmap details are linked in the footnotes.)
Olympia - Q3 2021
This was the original Radix mainnet release that occurred on July 28th, 2021.
Alexandria - Q4 2022
This was a major upgrade that occurred during December 2021 that provided preliminary tools for building blueprints and components using the Scrypto language.
Babylon - Q1 2023
This will be the upgrade where the blueprints and components go live. They provide ‘smart contract’ style capabilities allowing true decentralized apps (’dApps’) on Radix.
Xi’an - 2023
This upgrade will add the fully sharded Cerberus consensus mechanism allowing linear scaling over time.