Radix Week in Review: What an Operator Can Take With Them

At 15:34 UTC on Friday, one account on the Radix ledger paid out 1,500,000.33 XRD. In the same transaction another account gave up a single non-fungible token. Thirteen minutes later a post went up in the main Radix Telegram channel: after six years, Avaunt Staking was closing down its validator operations, and on 28 August its services would move to StakeSafe.

The token was the validator. On Radix a validator's authority lives in a badge, and a badge sits in an account like any other asset. Ownership of a node moves the way ownership of a picture moves. Somebody hands it over and somebody pays.

Three operators started packing up this week, and one question ran underneath all of them: what fits in the box. CaviarNine is leaving after five years and takes its website with it. Avaunt takes 1,456,311 XRD. The developer who runs Stokenet deletes an entire public test network on Saturday week and cannot delete the addresses on it. An operator owns the part that leaves. The ledger holds the part that stays, and this week the ecosystem got to see where the line falls.

CaviarNine is leaving

On 19 August, five years to the day after it minted FLOOP as the first utility token on Radix, CaviarNine announced that it is winding down its projects and leaving the network. The team found Radix in 2017, ran validators from the Olympia launch in July 2021, and built the aggregator, the on-chain order book, Shape Liquidity, the LSU Pool, instant unstaking, JustLock and Surge, the network's first perpetual DEX. By total value locked and by volume it was the largest thing anyone had built here.

The reason given is two sentences long: "the economics of operating here no longer work, and the network is a long way from what any of us signed up for in those early years." The wind-down runs in stages. The DEX website moves to withdraw-only, so LPs can remove positions and nothing else. Surge unwinds on an announced date, and collateral left unclaimed after it will be bridged to Ethereum and held for later claiming. JustLock is unaffected, and the announcement says why: it runs entirely on ledger.

That last clause is the whole distinction, and two days later CaviarNine spelled it out after members read the announcement as a shutdown. "We are not switching the DEX off. The smart contracts stay live on ledger. What changes is our website." Anyone can build a front end to those components, now or in a year, and the pools keep working. A member had asked whether the admin badges over the live components could go to the Radix Accountability Council, which has already set up a multisig treasury account for exactly that kind of asset. CaviarNine said badges touch fees and configuration, so it would come back with a considered answer rather than a quick one. That answer has not arrived.

One part of the estate goes unmentioned. CaviarNine-1 and CaviarNine-2 are the tenth and eleventh largest validators on Radix, holding 113,954,257 and 120,987,192 XRD between them, both charging a zero fee, neither carrying a pending change. That is 4.8% of all staked XRD sitting under an operator that has said it is leaving. Meanwhile the market it dominated carried on without it: Ociswap settled 8,455 swaps for 19.66M XRD in the seven days to Thursday, a third more volume than the week before.

A validator sold in one transaction

Avaunt's announcement reads as a plan. "On 28th August, all services will migrate to Stakesafe." Two follow-ups minutes later said there was no action required from any delegators, and that Avaunt was just transferring the Validator. The ledger had already done it. Thirteen minutes before the post, transaction txid_rdx1g52wl…q696ssj9u34 committed at epoch 336,948, and the validator owner badge for ⏩ Avaunt Staking ⏩ ShardSpace.app moved into the account that has held StakeSafe Amsterdam's badge since genesis. Read at epoch 337,470, state version 553,705,498, on 23 August, both badges sit in the same vault.

It was a sale, and the manifest says so plainly. StakeSafe's account paid 1,500,000.33 XRD. The account holding the Avaunt badge received 1,456,311 XRD and released the badge. The remaining 43,689.33 XRD went to the fee-collection component of Atomix, a peer-to-peer OTC dApp, which also paid the 0.84 XRD network fee for the whole thing.

Atomix settles trades with subintents, and this is what one looks like at scale. The buyer signs a partial transaction and so does the seller. Neither can execute alone. A root transaction pulls both in as children and asserts, before each hand-off, exactly what must come back: 1,456,311 XRD from one side, that one badge and nothing else from the other. If either assertion fails the whole thing aborts and no asset moves. There is no escrow, no multi-day settlement and no counterparty to trust, because the trade is one commit or none.

The detail worth keeping is who built the rail. Atomix is Avaunt's own product, alongside ShardSpace, Notix and Bullring. The developer who wrote the swap dApp used it to sell the largest thing they owned on the network.

The delegators inherited a number worth stating precisely. Avaunt Staking is the eighth-largest validator on Radix, with 148,980,503 XRD delegated to it at a 2% fee. StakeSafe's three validators charge 15% and have already filed to raise it: Amsterdam to 25% at epoch 339,608, Rotterdam to 25% and the seed node to 100% at epoch 339,609. Those epochs sit some 2,100 ahead of Sunday, which at five minutes each lands them in the last days of August. Avaunt's validator carries no fee change request at all. Its factor still reads 0.02.

The fee mechanism is what protects the people who stayed put, and it is built in rather than promised. On Radix a fee increase is a request. The owner records it on the ledger with the epoch it becomes effective, and it sits there in the open until then. StakeSafe can raise the fee on its new node. It cannot do it quietly, and it cannot do it this week. A delegator who reads that one field before a request lands sees the truth, and a delegator who reads it after has notice measured in epochs. None of that depended on anyone being told the node had been sold.

Staking arrives in the sharded VM

The Hyperscale repositories had their heaviest week yet: 352 commits in hyperscale-vm and 81 in hyperscale-rs between Sunday and Sunday. Most of them go in one direction. The stake pool became a single module on Sunday, founding validators were seeded as a record the network reads at genesis on Tuesday, and on Thursday a commit titled "Staking founds itself" closed the loop. The sharded VM can now stand up its own staking system from inside itself.

A second thread is a randomness source, and its design is the interesting part. A draw takes its seed from a beacon that rolled it in an earlier block, never from the block executing the draw, and each epoch folds its seed into a window a later draw can reach. A validator sequencing the transaction that draws therefore cannot see or shift what it will produce. Babylon, the network running today, has nothing like it.

Alongside that, wasmtime went to version 48, and a benchmark appeared. The vm-comparison repository times 1,000 distinct-sender token transfers on one CPU core: 25,412 transactions per second for hyperscale-vm against 1,253 for the Radix Engine, a factor of 20.3. Read the caveat in the README alongside the number. Hyperscale runs accounts as WebAssembly where the Radix Engine implements them natively. The gap therefore measures a difference in design as much as one in tuning, and the author who posted it called it "somewhat early days" in the same breath.

The channel also spent Saturday evening on privacy. flightofthefox sketched shieldable assets as a behaviour an issuer opts into, with XRD itself left alone. Take the state of the art from the market, most likely Zcash, and adapt it. The argument for doing it here is that shielding lands better on a multi-asset platform, where a manifest could unshield from a pool and do a dozen other things in the same transaction. No milestone carries it and no code implements it yet. The shape is now on the record.

Stokenet is deleted on Saturday week

Stokenet, the public test network, goes down at 07:00 UTC on Saturday 29 August and comes back from a fresh genesis. The cause is size. The ledger is growing at an estimated 320 GB a year against 110 GB in previous years, and nobody knows what changed. The operator plans to repeat the exercise every nine to twelve months.

Read the two halves of that announcement together and the week's shape appears once more. Destroyed: every balance, every transaction, every resource, package, component and dApp definition, and all on-ledger persona data. Preserved: the network ID, the Gateway URL, the well-known addresses, and your account address, because an account address on Radix is derived from your key rather than stored against your name. Developers redeploy their packages and re-fund from the faucet. Nobody re-derives an address. A total deletion of the state cannot reach the one thing that was never in it.

The ledger

Nothing came due this week. The StakeSafe fee rise and the Radix DAO's first ratified document both resolve in September and stay open.

Two new claims are recorded. First, that StakeSafe files a fee change request on the Avaunt validator raising it above 2%, due 20 September: at epoch 337,470 the validator's fee factor read 0.02 with a null change request, so a single Gateway read of that entity settles it either way. Second, that CaviarNine's two validators are transferred, deregistered, or have a fee change filed against them, due 4 October: both currently sit registered at a zero fee with no pending change, and the same read resolves it. The running table is on the series page.

The week on the ledger

Read live from the Radix Gateway at epoch 336,717, state version 552,607,062, on 20 August 2026.

Measure	Reading	Week on week
Staked XRD	4.91B, 36.3% of supply	−1.7%
Active validators	100 of 179 registered	no change
Validators holding a third of stake	8	no change
Ociswap 7-day volume	19.66M XRD	+35.0%
Ociswap 7-day swaps	8,455	+38.1%
Validators charging a fee that differs from the one stored	78, of which 59 active	no change

Next week the fee requests filed against StakeSafe's three original validators reach their epochs, Stokenet is wiped and rebuilt, and the Radix DAO's twenty-four governance documents remain pending. Watch the order in which a departure happens from here on. The ledger records the handover, the announcement catches up, and the thing that was handed over carries on without the people who built it.

The week on the Radix ledger – read at epoch 336,717, state version 552,607,062.

Sources

Radix Week in Review series: ← Previous: Aug 10–16, 2026 · All recaps

Previously: Hyperscale's VM registered a post-quantum signature scheme on Sunday. The week's other work, in code and in the DAO, was proving who is allowed to act.

HydrateLast updated 40m agov1.1.13 revisions

Week of	17–23 August 2026
Top story	CaviarNine is winding down its products and leaving the Radix network.