Radix Week in Review: CaviarNine Leaves, and Its Contracts Stay Live

The week in brief

• CaviarNine, the largest builder on Radix, is winding down after five years. Its contracts stay live on the ledger; what closes is its website.
• Avaunt sold its validator to StakeSafe for about 1.46 million XRD, in a single transaction that could not half-complete.
• Because a fee rise has to be announced on the ledger in advance, the people staked with that validator got notice without anyone telling them.
• The Hyperscale repositories had their heaviest week yet, and the sharded engine can now stand up its own staking system.
• A benchmark put the new engine 20 times faster than the Radix Engine on one core, with a caveat its author wrote down himself.
• Stokenet is wiped and restarted on 29 August. Account addresses survive it, because they were never stored on the network.

CaviarNine is leaving, and its code is not

On 19 August, five years to the day after minting the first utility token on Radix, CaviarNine said 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 most of what people used: the aggregator, the on-chain order book, Shape Liquidity, the LSU Pool, instant unstaking, JustLock, and Surge, the network's first perpetual exchange. By value held and by volume traded it was the largest thing anyone had built here. The reason given was that the economics of operating on Radix no longer work, and that the network is a long way from what the team signed up for.

The wind-down runs in stages. The exchange website becomes withdraw-only, so people can take their positions out and do nothing else. Surge unwinds on an announced date, and collateral left unclaimed afterwards will be moved to Ethereum and held there to be claimed later. JustLock is unaffected, and the announcement says why: it runs entirely on the ledger.

That distinction is the whole of it. Anyone can build a front end against those contracts, now or in a year, and the pools keep working. A community member asked whether the administrative badges over the live components could pass to the Radix Accountability Council, which has already set up a shared treasury account for exactly that kind of asset. CaviarNine said those badges touch fees and configuration and that it would come back with a considered answer rather than a quick one. That answer has not arrived.

One part of the estate went unmentioned. CaviarNine-1 and CaviarNine-2 are the tenth and eleventh largest validators on Radix, holding about 235 million XRD between them, both charging nothing and 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: Ociswap settled 8,455 swaps in the seven days to Thursday, a third more volume than the week before.

A validator sold in one transaction

Avaunt announced on Friday that its services would move to StakeSafe on 28 August, with nothing required from anyone staked with it. The ledger had already done the work. Thirteen minutes before the post, a transaction moved the validator's owner badge into the account that has held StakeSafe Amsterdam's badge since the beginning.

On Radix a validator's authority lives in a badge, and a badge sits in an account like any other asset, so a node changes hands the way a painting does. It was a sale, and the transaction says so: StakeSafe paid about 1.5 million XRD, the Avaunt account received about 1.46 million and released the badge, and the difference went to the fee component of Atomix, a peer-to-peer trading application, which also paid the network fee of under one XRD for the whole thing.

Atomix settles trades using subintents, and this is what one looks like at size. The buyer signs a partial transaction and so does the seller, and neither can execute on its own. A parent transaction pulls both in and states, before each hand-off, exactly what has to come back: this many XRD from one side, that one badge and nothing else from the other. If either statement turns out false the whole thing aborts and nothing moves. There is no escrow, no settlement period and no counterparty to trust, because it is one commit or none. Atomix is Avaunt's own product, so the developer who wrote the trading application used it to sell the largest thing he owned on the network.

The people staked with that validator inherited a number. Avaunt is the eighth largest validator on Radix, with roughly 149 million XRD delegated to it at a 2% fee. StakeSafe's three validators charge 15% and have already filed to raise it, two to 25% and one to 100%, at epochs falling in the last days of August. Avaunt's own validator carries no fee change at all.

What protects those delegators 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 takes effect, and it sits there in the open until then. StakeSafe can raise the fee on its new node, but it cannot do it quietly and it cannot do it immediately. Anyone reading that one field gets the truth, and none of it depended on being told the node had been sold.

Staking arrives in the sharded engine

The Hyperscale repositories had their heaviest week yet, and most of it went one way. The stake pool became a single module on Sunday, the founding validators were seeded as a record the network reads at startup on Tuesday, and on Thursday a commit titled "Staking founds itself" closed the loop: the sharded engine can now stand up its own staking system from inside itself.

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

A benchmark also appeared, timing 1,000 token transfers from distinct senders on a single processor core: 25,412 a second for the new engine against 1,253 for the Radix Engine, a factor of twenty. The caveat is in the repository's own README, and it matters: Hyperscale runs accounts as WebAssembly where the Radix Engine implements them natively, so the gap measures a difference in design as much as in tuning. The author called it early days in the same breath as posting it.

On Saturday evening the channel turned to privacy. flightofthefox sketched shieldable assets as something an issuer opts into, with XRD itself left alone, taking the best available approach from elsewhere and adapting it. The argument for doing it on Radix is that shielding fits a multi-asset platform, where a single transaction could unshield from a pool and do a dozen other things at once. No milestone carries it and no code implements it.

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 scratch. 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.

Everything on it goes: balances, transactions, resources, packages, components, application definitions and stored persona data. Four things survive, and the fourth is the interesting one: the network identifier, the Gateway address, the well-known addresses, and your own account address. A Radix account address is derived from your key rather than recorded against your name, so a total deletion of the network's state cannot reach it. Developers redeploy their code and refill from the faucet; nobody has to re-derive an address.

The week on the ledger

Read from the Radix Gateway as the ledger stood at midday on 23 August 2026, epoch 337,481, against the same reading a week earlier.

Stake fell by 93 million XRD over the week, and a third of that came from one validator: CaviarNine-1 alone shed 28 million.

Concentration watch

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

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 on the Avaunt validator raising it above 2%, due 20 September; the validator currently reads 2% with no request pending, so one Gateway read settles it. 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 zero with nothing pending. The running table is on the series page.

This week on the wiki

CaviarNine for what is closing and what is not, and Avaunt Staking for the validator that changed hands.

What to watch

• What happens to CaviarNine's two validators, holding 4.8% of all staked XRD under an operator that is leaving.
• Whether the administrative badges pass to the council, which CaviarNine said it would answer properly.
• Stokenet coming back on 29 August, and how much of the ecosystem redeploys onto it.

Corrections

Nothing this week.

Next: whether CaviarNine says anything about its validators, and whether Stokenet comes back on time.

Radix Week in Review series, Issue #9: ← Previous: Issue #8, Aug 10–16, 2026 · Next: Issue #10, Aug 24–30, 2026 → · All recaps · Subscribe

Previously: Radix accounts gained a third signature scheme, one built to survive quantum computers, and the DAO began recording a checkable fingerprint of every governance document.