Radix Week in Review: hyperscale-rs Closes On Its First Milestone

The week in brief

• hyperscale-rs, the community's Rust rebuild of Radix's scaling design, is close to its first milestone; the last hard problem in front of it is state contention.
• Governance of the network's own parameters now runs on the ledger rather than in configuration files.
• A community developer published a Rust software development kit for Radix, filling a gap that had only ever been covered in JavaScript.
• Hookah, which tells an application when something it cares about happens on the ledger, went fully open source and self-hostable.
• The operator who runs most of the test network set out a plan to rebuild it from scratch, to cut what it costs to keep running.
• Nothing this week came from the Radix Foundation, which is in maintenance mode with its infrastructure funded into late 2026.

Every item this week was built by somebody who does not work for the company that started Radix, which is what the handover was supposed to produce and is now producing.

The scaling work moves to the community

Hyperscale is Radix's design for splitting the network into shards, which are slices that process transactions in parallel while still agreeing with one another. When the Foundation finished its own phase of the work it handed over a baseline rather than a promise: the software, the test scripts, the network configurations, and a public test that sustained 500,000 transactions a second in real cross-shard swaps without losing atomicity, meaning a transaction touching two shards still either happens completely or not at all.

hyperscale-rs is the community's ground-up Rust implementation of that design, and it is where the research now happens. Two things moved this week: governance of the network's own parameters landed on the ledger, so those settings are changed by a vote rather than by editing a file; and the team narrowed its remaining work to state contention.

Contention is the problem sharding cannot solve by adding shards. Two transactions that both want to change the same piece of state, such as the price of one trading pool, have to be put in an order, and no amount of parallelism removes that. The approach being built batches the contending writes so a single shard sequences them together under one lock, rather than taking a lock for each. It is unglamorous work, and it is the part everything else rests on. The Foundation still supplies the machines for the larger test runs.

Two pieces of tooling

For years several of Radix's basic building blocks existed only in JavaScript. This week a community developer, genkipool, published a native Rust kit covering the parts that sit off the ledger: verifying a ROLA login, which is how a wallet proves who it is to a website without sending a transaction; building and signing transactions; managing keys; and deriving addresses. It is dual-licensed under MIT and Apache-2.0, and it ships with a server that lets an AI agent talk to a Radix wallet directly. It has eight commits and one star, so it is a beginning rather than a dependency.

Hookah went fully open the same week. It used to be a hosted service; it is now MIT-licensed and self-hostable, and it does one useful thing: an application registers the on-ledger events it cares about, and Hookah sends it a message the moment one happens. Without something like it, an application has to poll the ledger and work out for itself what changed.

Arguing about who runs it

The developer and community channels spent the week on governance, and the arguments were the real ones: how much authority a council should hold; where moderation stops and censorship starts; and how to keep any single body small enough that nobody can capture it. The Radix Accountability Council, the emerging DAO and its working groups are all being assembled in public on RadixTalk. The governance page on this wiki tracks how the pieces fit together.

The same shift showed up in the plumbing. The community operator who runs most of Stokenet, the public test network, set out a plan to reset it in the third quarter: a fresh start with no migration of existing data, chosen because it brings the hosting bill down to something the community can pay without a corporate budget. Proposals also circulated to keep the mobile wallet maintained and lightly improved until the next major upgrade, and to decide as a community what it should become after that.

The week on the ledger

Read from the Radix Gateway as the ledger stood at midday on 12 July 2026, epoch 325,385, against the same reading a week earlier.

A flat week: stake within a rounding error of the week before, and three validators leaving the registered list without touching the active set.

Concentration watch

Eight validators held a third of all staked XRD, unchanged, and 15 held half.

This week on the wiki

The pages worth reading alongside this issue are hyperscale-rs, which tracks the milestone work; the 500,000 transactions-per-second test that set the baseline; and Hookah.

What to watch

• Milestone 1 on hyperscale-rs, which needs the contention work to land first.
• The Stokenet reset in the third quarter, and whether anything on the test network needs migrating before it happens.
• Whether the Rust kit picks up a second contributor, which is the difference between a repository and a dependency.

Corrections

Nothing this week.

Next: whether the contention work lands, and what a reset test network means for anyone building on it.

Radix Week in Review series, Issue #3: ← Previous: Issue #2, Mar 16–22, 2026 · Next: Issue #4, Jul 13–19, 2026 → · All recaps · Subscribe

Previously: A month after the Foundation published the Hyperscale code, its 500,000 transactions-per-second result is something anyone can rebuild and check.

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