Radix Week in Review: A Test Network Replays Fifteen Months in Two Hours

The week in brief

• Stokenet was rebuilt from scratch and caught up on three protocol updates in under two hours, work that took mainnet 315 days.
• It did that because an update is gated by a stake threshold rather than a date, and one person held all four validators on the new network.
• The DAO moved its governance repository off a personal account onto its own, and switched on radixdao.org as its official venue.
• Its lawyers agreed amended terms with MIDAO; the filing for RADIX DAO LLC begins on Monday, and the registry takes four to six weeks after that.
• 349 commits landed across the tracked repositories, all from one person, and none in the three repositories under the company's own name.
• Six validator fee rises are queued on the ledger, the first landing today, with about 337 million XRD of stake behind them.

Fifteen months of protocol history in one evening

Radix's public test network went down at 07:00 UTC on Saturday and came back just before one o'clock on a fresh start with four validators, the first full reset in three years. Daffy, who has hosted most of the community-run network since the Radix Foundation handed it over, gave a day's notice in the developer chat and eleven days' in the main group. Every balance, package and transaction from before is gone; account addresses, the network identifier and the Gateway address are not.

Keeping the network identifier made it awkward. The starting state for that network is compiled into the node software with no way to override it, so reusing the name meant changing the software: a two-line overlay replacing one file, with everything else left as the official release. The published install instructions no longer work without extra steps.

The consequence appeared two hours after relaunch. A developer published a package without trouble, then found that anything referring to the AccountLocker component came back as though that component were not on the ledger. It was not. AccountLocker arrived with the Bottlenose protocol update, and the reset network had restarted at the very beginning, behind every update Radix has ever shipped. It had to catch up the way mainnet did, one update at a time.

Each update commits as a transaction, so the Gateway records exactly when it landed. On the reset network Anemone landed at epoch 105, Bottlenose at 117 and the first part of Cuttlefish at 135, all three inside two hours on Saturday evening. On mainnet the same three sit at epochs 70,574, 105,352 and 160,922, dated February, June and December 2024, with 315 days between the first and the last.

The speed reflects who held the validator badges. Applying an update takes a threshold rather than a date or a switch: it enacts at the start of an epoch, once validators holding 80% of the stake have signalled readiness for ten epochs running. Four validators behind a single owner badge clear 80% between them. Asked in the developer chat whether they had to signal at all, the operator said the last badge had never been handed over, so the holding was 100% against a requirement of 80% and the update was going through either way. It stopped at the first part of Cuttlefish; the second part is unshipped on mainnet, and the operator said that decision was not one person's to make.

The round counts show something else. Radix has no block time; it counts rounds, and an epoch ends on whichever comes first, a five-minute target or a ceiling of 3,000 rounds. Through Sunday morning the reset network averaged 3,004 rounds an epoch and about 220 seconds, so it is ending on the ceiling; mainnet over the same hours averaged 1,601 rounds and 300 seconds, which is the target. Four validators sitting close together get through rounds faster than a busy network does, and the operator expects epoch times to settle back as traffic returns.

The DAO moves its papers out of a personal account

On Friday the governance repository moved off Daffy's personal GitHub account to the DAO's own organisation, and radixdao.org was switched on as the official venue, deployed automatically from that repository. It changes nothing anyone can measure today, and it is probably the most consequential thing that happened to the DAO this week: an organisation keeping its rules in an account one person controls has not separated the rules from the person, which is precisely what the framework it is drafting exists to do.

The paperwork moved the same day. The Radix Accountability Council reported that it and its lawyers had reviewed the MIDAO service agreement, proposed amendments and had them accepted. Payment follows, then the submission of RADIX DAO LLC to the Marshall Islands government, starting Monday. The council was careful about what comes next: the filing has several steps, it is not yet at the point where the clock starts, and the certificate takes the registry four to six weeks once it is.

The governance index now lists 27 documents: 26 read "signed, awaiting ratification", one is pending, and the page says in its own words that nothing there is in force. Each signed document is published as a PDF whose fingerprint is recorded in the ratification proposal, so a member can check their own copy. The phase at the top of the page reads pre-formation, ratification starts with a discussion period on the forum, and no date has been set for it. A signed constitution nobody has voted on, a company with no certificate, and a council whose permanent members have not been elected.

One contributor, 349 commits, and the cost nobody charges for

Across the five repositories this series tracks, the seven days to 30 August produced 349 commits over 385 files, and every one is flightofthefox's. The new virtual machine took 338 of them across five days; hyperscale-rs took 11, mostly bumping the version of the engine it depends on. The three repositories under the company's own name recorded nothing at all.

On Thursday the subject was fees, and specifically what Radix does not currently charge for. A developer asked why minting a million NFTs runs to tens of thousands of XRD in batches of twenty, and whether the new engine could lift the limit. The answer went past the limit to the accounting behind it.

Hyperscale will meet that with state bonding, closest in shape to Sui's among the networks that already do this. The reasoning matters more than the mechanism: in a sharded system whose security rests on shuffling validators between shards, state has to move whenever the assignment changes, so bloating state is close to the most expensive thing a user can do to a network that never charged them for it. A transaction size ceiling of about one megabyte was defended in the same thread as a deliberate choice, on the grounds that sizing everything around hundred-megabyte edge cases makes the system worse for everyone else. The Radix Engine prices execution and storage at the moment of writing and nothing thereafter, and that is being replaced rather than tuned. None of it is shipped, and the same developer said this week that the engine is not yet safe to build against.

Fees with a date on them

Six fee changes are queued on the ledger and the first lands today. StakeSafe has rises on three of its own validators, and the node it bought from Avaunt Staking on 21 August carries a fourth.

A fee change is announced to the ledger before it takes effect, so anyone reading the pending field has about a fortnight to move their stake. Meanwhile 77 validators charge a fee that differs from the one stored in their own record, 58 of them active with 2.88 billion XRD behind them, because the engine records a change as a request with an effective epoch and never rewrites the stored figure. Any dashboard reading the wrong field shows the old number forever. CaviarNine's two validators, unmentioned in its departure notice, were still registered and still charging nothing at the end of the week.

The week on the ledger

Read from the Radix Gateway as the ledger stood at midday on 30 August 2026, epoch 339,497, against the same reading a week earlier.

Stake recovered the previous week's fall. Ociswap's seven-day volume fell 45%, which is the number that will read differently in a month.

Concentration watch

Eight validators held a third of all staked XRD, unchanged, and 15 held half. The six queued fee rises above are the mechanism that moves this number, and by the next reading the first three will have taken effect.

The ledger

Nothing new came due. The three open claims were re-read rather than left dated: StakeSafe's three queued rises are still queued and none withdrawn; CaviarNine's two validators are still registered, still accepting stake and still charging nothing; and the DAO's governance index has gone from 24 documents to 27 with none in force, which leaves that claim untouched.

Two claims are recorded this week: that the Marshall Islands issues a certificate of formation for RADIX DAO LLC by 25 October, checkable against the council's notices and the registry; and that the new virtual machine records at least 200 commits in the fortnight from 31 August, checkable with one GitHub call against a baseline of 338 in the week just ended. Both are on the series page.

This week on the wiki

Read Stokenet. The article now carries the reset as a dated operational record rather than a description of a service: what went down and when, what came back, what an account holder found in the wallet afterwards, and what a developer has to redo. It answers what the developer chat kept asking all weekend, in one account rather than four hundred messages.

What to watch

• Epochs 339,608 and 339,609, today. Two StakeSafe validators go to 25% and the seed node to 100%. Read the fee actually charged, not the stored figure, which will still say 15% afterwards.
• The Marshall Islands filing starting Monday, and whether the clock the council described actually starts.
• Whether anything lands in the company's own repositories, which recorded nothing this week.

Corrections

Nothing this week.

Next: the first three fee rises take effect, and the Marshall Islands filing either starts its clock or does not.

Radix Week in Review series, Issue #10: ← Previous: Issue #9, Aug 17–23, 2026 · Next: Issue #11, Aug 31 – Sep 6, 2026 → · All recaps · Subscribe

Previously: The largest builder on Radix is winding down but leaving its code running, and a validator changed hands in a single transaction that could not half-complete.