Radix (XRD) – The Radix DLT Crypto Wiki

Radix [ /rædɪks/ ] (Native asset: $XRD; sign: √ ) is a pre-sharded, 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 $eXRD was superseded by native $XRD in July 2021 with the launch of Radix’s Olympia Mainnet.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. That work now continues in the community-led Rust implementation hyperscale-rs, whose April 2026 RFC targets the planned Xi’an upgrade that brings sharding to production.

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.

Tests using Radix’s Cassandra cross-shard, atomically composable testnet and the Cerberus consensus mechanism have shown promise in being able to host and serve website data as well as ledger state:

“There’s a possibility that in some circumstances the actual content retrieval could maybe even outperform traditional centralized web servers because it’s automatically distributed; it’s load balanced.” - Dan Hughes, YouTube

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.

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)

From the Xi’an release, Radix will use a fixed shard space of 2^256 shards, with responsibility over the shard space orchestrated by an uncapped number of validator sets called shard groups, allowing transaction throughput to scale linearly with the number of nodes.

This upgrade is intended to bring sharded consensus to production, allowing throughput to scale linearly over time. The original design for this was the fully sharded Cerberus consensus mechanism, though the current leading candidate (the community hyperscale-rs implementation, below) diverges from it, using a HotStuff-2–derived per-shard consensus rather than Cerberus.

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 800,000 TPS 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. Development is now being continued by the community, with the hyperscale-rs Rust implementation emerging as the leading candidate. By April 2026, foundational consensus was complete (29 crates, 1,200+ commits) and lead developer flightofthefox submitted an 18-month RFC for delivering Xi'an to the governance forum, with milestones overseen by the Radix Accountability Council.

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. The elected members – Peachy, Faraz, Jazzer_9F, Avaunt, and projectShift – serve as facilitators coordinating the 2026 handover.

The community also voted to phase out the validator subsidy with 71.6% support (over 1 billion XRD from 604 accounts). The subsidy is being tapered from $350/month in February to complete elimination by June 2026, transitioning Radix from a Foundation-subsidized model to a fee-driven market.

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