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In brief

  • On Sunday morning the Hyperscale developers added a post-quantum signature scheme to the new virtual machine. It is the third scheme Radix accounts can use.
  • Most of the week's 206 commits changed how a transaction proves it may act. A key signs you in. A badge opens the guarded parts of an account.
  • The DAO's transition council ended a 34-day silence. The Foundation has approved the operating agreement and paid the second grant tranche.
  • The DAO's website now records a digest of each governance document on the ledger, so any member can check their own copy. All 24 documents are still drafts.

A seal is a lump of wax with a picture pressed into it. The picture comes from an engraved metal die. One household holds the die, and that is the whole trick. A stranger arrives with a document and an instruction. You do not have to decide whether to believe him. You hold his wax against an impression you already have. It matches, or it does not.

Take the seal away and you have nothing to compare. An instruction is worth what the man carrying it can persuade you it is worth. The best name to imitate is the one everyone already trusts. You learn that nobody gave the instruction after you have obeyed it.

Radix worked on that mechanism this week, at both ends of itself. In the machine, 206 commits across hyperscale-rs and hyperscale-vm changed what holding a key entitles you to. In the institution, the DAO's new site began to record a digest of every governance document on the ledger. A member can now check a document without asking anyone whether it is genuine.

The argument sat between the two. For two days the main channel fought over a council that had shown the community nothing for 34 days. The engineers spent the same week encoding that same question. Can a name and a promise settle a claim, or must you present something the other side can check?

A Signature Signs You In

Sixty-three commits landed in the new virtual machine this week. Another 143 landed in the consensus stack around it. Almost all of the VM's commits answer one question. What makes a call allowed?

Most of crypto answers that the signature is the authority. Sign a transaction with the right key and every door in the account opens. Radix has never quite worked that way. Its badge model treats permission as a resource. An account holds a badge and presents it inside the transaction, where the rest of the network can watch it do so. A retainer's badge worked the same way. It showed whose authority he carried, and the guard at the gate could examine it.

A commit on Wednesday states the new rule in one line: let a signature sign in and nothing else; guarded methods take badges. The key gets you through the door. Entering a guarded room is a second act, and it happens in the open.

The pieces arrived in order. On Tuesday the VM learned to state an authority rule as a threshold over identities: two of these three, or any one of those. It also learned to mint an account's identity as evidence that later calls must present. On Wednesday came securification. An account's stored rule now governs who may act on it, and the key that first named the account no longer decides.

Two more pieces landed the same day. An auth cell with three roles and a timed recovery proposal means a lost key costs the owner time and not the account. The custody gate makes simple possession of a badge a third way to prove you may act. Stake pools received owner badges at genesis, and the operator surface now refuses anyone who cannot show one.

The consensus stack spent the same days learning to demand paperwork at every seam. A shared verdict binds a transaction's payer before the network charges anything to it. A shard refuses a payer the manifest never bound to it. Effects do not settle until every participating shard presents its certificate. A node that lacks the code a tick depends on holds the tick until it has fetched it. None of this is glamorous. Every door now has someone checking the seal.

A Seal No Future Machine Can Cut

At 02:45 UTC on Sunday morning the VM registered ML-DSA-65 in its signature scheme registry. Thirty-three minutes later the consensus stack could sign and verify transactions with it. The securification test now covers the upgrade path, and a test account exists that has never held any other kind of key.

ML-DSA is a lattice signature scheme. NIST standardised it as FIPS 204, and the 65 names its middle parameter set. A large quantum computer would be good at breaking the discrete logarithm, which today's elliptic-curve signatures rest on. ML-DSA does not use that mathematics.

Babylon accepts two schemes today: Ed25519, and the secp256k1 it inherited from Olympia. This makes a third. Securification changes an account's auth rules and leaves the key that first named it alone. An account can therefore adopt the new scheme and keep its address. Nobody has to move. Governance could retire the older schemes if the day ever looks close, and the developer's sketch of how is characteristic. Let a legacy account securify and do nothing else, so the only move left is the safe one.

The channel reached for a comparison at once. A member noted parity with a NEAR press release from the same week. The lead developer played it down. Post-quantum work belongs to no milestone, because it cuts across all of them. Signing a transaction is the very easy part. The large piece is the consensus layer's own signing and verification, which pulls in zero-knowledge proofs and hash-based schemes such as WOTS+ and XMSS.

That distinction is worth holding on to. Signing a payment under new mathematics means cutting one new die. Doing the same for consensus means recutting every die at once, while the network keeps agreeing on what its existing impressions are worth.

One more consequence surfaced in the same exchange, and holders of old accounts should mark it. Addresses may change at the upgrade whatever signature scheme they use. The sharded design gives an account and its vaults a single owner-based prefix. Today they scatter across the shard space, and every transaction that touches them drags in extra shards.

Thirty-Four Days

On Wednesday morning a long-standing member of the main Telegram channel counted the days since the Transition Radix Accountability Council last told the community anything. He then asked the question the council's own name invites. Can the people I am accountable to understand the current state, the risks and the next steps without chasing me?

The argument ran for two days and was the most-read thing in the ecosystem this week. One side held that five volunteers doing legal work in their evenings owe nobody a weekly performance. Public shaming, they said, is how you make certain nobody stands for the next council. The other side held that a role with accountability in its title carries a minimum. Thirty-four days of silence is drift, and drift has cost Radix more than any rival has. Both sides argued in good faith about a real gap. Two people outside the council filled it in the meantime. Timan and Daffy published more about the DAO's machinery in a week than the council had in a month.

The council posted on Thursday afternoon. The Foundation has validated the proposed operating agreement and agrees that it fits the end goal, which is handing over the assets it holds. The second tranche of the setup grant has arrived, so the council can pay its expenses. Nothing now waits on the Foundation. Counsel expects to approach MIDAO with the formal application within days. The Charter is close to its final text. A vote will ratify it, and the threshold will be deliberately high. At least seven people intend to stand for the seven permanent seats.

The council's own framing deserves quoting, because it inverts the usual order of these things. The company must exist, but the Charter carries the weight. The community has to understand it, support it and use it, and no governance will happen except by following it. A charter nobody has read is a seal nobody can recognise. A seal nobody can recognise cannot catch a forgery, and catching forgeries is the only work a seal has ever done.

Twenty-Four Documents, None In Force

The machinery for that recognition shipped on Friday. The DAO merged a change into its site the day after the council's update, and it gives every governance document a checkable mark. When a proposal activates a document, the site publishes that document as a PDF and the proposal records its SHA-256 digest on the ledger. The site then republishes the digest. A member can hash their own copy and confirm it matches the file the DAO voted on.

The site keeps superseded digests on purpose. A member holding an old version learns that the copy is genuine but out of date, and not that it is unrecognised. Nobody types a digest by hand. The publishing workflow downloads the PDF, hashes it and cross-checks the result.

Twenty-four documents sit there this morning, across ten categories, and every one reads pending. Nothing is in force. Nobody has called the first vote, which is the ratification of the Charter. The verification page tells the same story on the ledger. The governance contract, the master badge, the owner badge and the governance package are all live and linked to the dashboard. XRD is the voting-power resource. The DAO has yet to deploy any of its five treasury accounts. The dies are cut. Nobody has pressed anything into wax.

The smaller work continued around it. The framework tightened its election policies against edge cases and added a contributor compensation regime with requests, renewals and challenges. Majority Judgment became the default election method. On-chain identifiers moved into the Charter itself, so they change only when the Charter changes. The governance repository still sits under a personal account and is due to move to the DAO's organisation. radixdao.org now stands as the interim official venue.

One gap has no owner. News of an AI red team sweeping Bitcoin's repositories sent the hyperscale channel into Thursday evening on a single question. How does a community-funded network pay to have its code checked? The lead developer answered the red-team half on timing. Pointing frontier models at a half-built execution layer produces noise about code he already knows needs attention. The exercise belongs at the first testnet, when everyone can try to hack their way to king of the hill. An audit before Xi'an reaches mainnet is a separate matter. The channel's answer to who pays for that was a hope, not a line in a budget. The treasury that would fund it is one of the five accounts still waiting to be deployed.

Two votes now wait on the same dependency, which is the consultation application that will run them. The ratification vote will be the first time the DAO uses this machinery to bind itself. The first document to carry a digest on the ledger will be the one that explains what the digests are for.

Radix Week in Review series: ← Previous: Aug 3–9, 2026 · All recaps

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