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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 (unsharded), and the native $XRD token.

Main article: Radix Developer Environment (Alexandria)

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

Main article: Radix Mainnet (Babylon)

The Babylon release will debut blueprints and components / smart contracts, allowing true decentralized apps (’dApps’) on Radix. It is also expected to include staking changes and validator management improvements, among other updates.

Main article: Radix Mainnet (Xi’an)

This upgrade will add the fully sharded Cerberus consensus mechanism allowing for linear scaling over time.

Main article: Sharding

Radix’s data layer is a deterministic index of 2^256 shards. This system provides the dual benefits of co-locating related data for simple validation while fully separating unrelated data for parallel processing, which allows the network to handle enormous transaction volumes across asynchronously operating shards.

To maintain security, Radix ties node identities to shards. For the current Babylon release, all shards are maintained by a single shard group but once the shard group cap is lifted for Xi’an, market-driven incentives will promote sufficient node distribution across all shards.

Main article: Cerberus

Cerberus is a consensus protocol suite developed by RDX Works for the Radix network, designed to facilitate scalable, secure, and decentralized global consensus across shard groups in distributed computing environments. It offers a family of deterministic, Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus mechanisms optimized for the network's multi-shard architecture, solving several issues that were present in Radix's previous consensus model, Tempo.

The Cerberus protocol enables efficient parallel transaction processing across multiple shards, ensuring scalability by minimizing coordination costs. It ensures security through its BFT consensus within each shard, tolerating Byzantine failures up to one-third of the nodes. Its decentralized nature allows for permissionless participation by validators, maintaining security as long as no single entity controls a significant portion of the validating nodes.

Cerberus achieves its efficiency through a three-step approach that handles transactions atomically. This approach avoids global transaction ordering, a significant bottleneck in traditional networks. Instead, Cerberus employs a UTXO-based sharding method, facilitating concurrent transaction processing within the same shard without explicit locking mechanisms. Its cross-shard communication is streamlined, allowing for high transaction throughput and linear scalability as the number of shards grows.

There are three variants of Cerberus:

Testing has demonstrated that Cerberus protocols can handle millions of transactions per second, outperforming other multi-shard consensus protocols in throughput, efficiency, and latency.

Apart from its primary implementation on the Radix network, Cerberus has also been adopted by other projects like Tari, indicating its growing influence in the sphere of distributed consensus algorithms.

Main article: Scrypto

Scrypto is a smart contract language specifically for building decentralized apps on the Radix Network. It enhances Rust with libraries and extensions for an asset-oriented approach, treating digital assets like tokens and NFTs as first-class objects. Scrypto supports various programming paradigms and is statically typed with strong compile-time checks for better security.

Key features include an asset-oriented programming model, finite state machine for tokens, access control through badges, a built-in royalty system, and extensive developer tooling. Scrypto's syntax extends Rust's, adding blockchain-specific primitives and functions, and compiles to WebAssembly.

Scrypto offers a unique blueprint concept, allowing developers to create modular and reusable smart contract components. It also facilitates package management for organizing and sharing code, with namespace control and versioning.

Compared to other smart contract languages like Solidity, Scrypto aims for intuitive, secure asset handling, and predictable behavior with its domain-specific design. It focuses on asset orientation rather than accounts, providing a more intuitive and secure environment for dApp development.

Main article: Radix Engine

The Radix Engine is a core component of the Radix Protocol, designed to function as a protocol-level runtime environment and application layer, similar in concept to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). It serves as the execution environment within the Radix Protocol, which also incorporates Cerberus as its consensus protocol and employs Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) system for Sybil resistance.

Radix Engine v1, was released with the Radix Olympia mainnet in July 2021. This initial version embedded Radix Engine’s Finite State Machine (FSM) approach into the protocol, streamlining the issuance and transaction processes for $XRD tokens and those created by third parties through simple API calls instead of complex smart contract logic.

The Radix Engine emphasizes an asset-oriented approach to smart contract environments in contrast to the development paradigms of Ethereum and other smart contract platforms, which often require more complex and custom-coded logic.

Main article: Delegated Proof of Stake

Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) is a Sybil protection mechanism used by Radix for network security and efficiency. It allows token holders to delegate their tokens to validators, who are then responsible for maintaining the integrity of the ledger by validating transactions.

Radix has tailored its staking system to promote network health, with staking rewards distributed in proportion to the stake amount. Delegation is done by "locking" tokens with preferred validators rather than transferring ownership.

The staking process on Radix is straightforward: any $XRD token holder can stake their tokens via the Radix Desktop Wallet and earn rewards from subsequent epochs. There is a cooldown period for unstaking, primarily for security purposes.

Emissions on Radix refer to the new $XRD tokens created as rewards, with about 300 million minted annually. Validators and stakers earn emissions based on their staked amount, performance, and fees. The top 100 nodes by stake amount are chosen as validators each epoch.

Radix nodes are instances of the radixnode software. The recommended method to run a node is via the radixnode CLI tool, which may be run on any Linux or Ubuntu system.

The validator set is currently limited to 100 for the Babylon release but will eventually support an unlimited number of validator nodes upon the release of Xi’an.