Radix Week in Review: A Refund List for the Stuck hUSDC

Week in brief

• Hyperlane agreed on 8 October to help release the hUSDC stuck in a bridge transfer since the 31 August drain; the refund list names 79 accounts.
• RocketX reopened XRD to ETH trades through Astrolescent, capped at about 500 US dollars a trade.
• Eleven accounts unstaked 131m XRD from the Weft validator, which has been offline since 11 September.
• RadixTalk now charges 50%, and Sirius and Polaris have queued a rise from 25% to 50% for about 23 October.
• The DAO's ratified documents now read "in force at activation"; an Activation Vote comes next.
• hyperscale-rs took 39 commits, 18 of them on breaking deadlocks between transactions on different shards.
• Ciggie Puffs, an NFT collection drawn entirely on-ledger, launched on mainnet.

Six weeks after the August drain, the money it stranded has a list of owners. Hyperlane, the bridge whose routes carried the stolen assets off Radix, agreed on 8 October to help release the USDC behind a transfer that never completed, and the next morning the Radix Foundation published which accounts get it and the code that decided.

The week's largest movement on the ledger was delegators leaving: 131m XRD came off a validator that has not voted since the network restarted, in eleven transactions over two nights. Two validators queued a doubling of their fees, the DAO's documents moved one step closer to binding, and Hyperscale worked on what happens when two transactions on different shards wait on each other.

A refund list for the stuck hUSDC

hUSDC is USDC bridged onto Radix through Hyperlane. When the attacker emptied the network of its bridged assets on 31 August, one of their transfers out, about 442,000 hUSDC, had not completed when Hyperlane shut its routes: the hUSDC was burned on Radix, but the USDC on Ethereum that should have paid it out was never released (the drain and halt). XRD holders voted on 4 October that, if it is recovered, it goes back to the accounts it was taken from. On 8 October Timan, writing for the Foundation, said Hyperlane is helping recover it, which had not been certain (Telegram). The two transfers that did complete, of about 380 and 15,000 hUSDC, are not refunded.

On 9 October he published the allocation sheet and the code behind it, and asked holders to check both (announcement). The code reads the ledger as it stood just before the theft and traces the 442,986 hUSDC to what each account held in its wallet, in pools, in CaviarNine liquidity positions, in order-book orders and in Stabilis loans. Anyone can rerun it against the public Gateway. Nothing is paid until the collateral reaches a wallet the Foundation controls.

A way out while the bridge is shut

On 10 October RocketX, a cross-chain swap service, re-enabled trades between XRD and ETH on Astrolescent, capped at around 500 US dollars a trade while some of the exchange pools it routes through stay offline (Telegram). Timan expects Hyperlane's routes to reopen once the recovery is complete.

Gate, the centralised exchange, still has XRD deposits disabled on both its Radix and Ethereum chains, read from its currency endpoint on 11 October. Trading and withdrawals are open there.

131m XRD leaves an offline validator

Weft Finance, a lending protocol, also runs a validator. The node has made no consensus proposal since mainnet restarted on 11 September, so its delegators have earned nothing. Its stake held near 185m XRD through September regardless.

Then eleven accounts left in two bursts: two between 16:29 and 16:31 UTC on 7 October (first), and nine between 00:37 and 00:52 UTC on 8 October (first of the nine). Each unstaked a round number of Liquid Stake Units, the tokens a delegator holds in place of staked XRD, between 5m and 20m. Together they returned 111.9m units, worth 131.4m XRD at 1.174 XRD a unit. That is more than the network's whole net fall in stake for the week, 84.6m XRD: stake on every other validator rose by a net 46.7m, 35.7m of it on Ocinode.

Why an offline validator matters

Radix commits a round of consensus when validators holding more than two thirds of the active stake vote for it. Stake on a node that never votes counts toward the total and never toward the vote, so it narrows the margin every other validator works within. Weft's node held 3.9% of active stake on 4 October and holds 1.2% now. It is still registered and still in the active set of 100.

Unstaked XRD can be claimed 2,016 epochs, about a week, after the unstake, so the 131m becomes claimable around 14 and 15 October. Where it is staked again, if it is, will show in the next reading.

One fee rise lands, two more are queued

RadixTalk's increase from 1.5% to 50% took effect at epoch 348,297, about 10 October, as its request said, and its stake fell from 73.0m to 67.3m XRD over the week. On 9 October one transaction filed a further rise on Sirius and Polaris, the two validators CaviarNine ran before it wound down. It was signed by the account that queued the 25% rises on the same pair on 23 September, which took effect around 7 October. A fee increase is charged 4,032 epochs, about two weeks, after it is filed, so 50% lands at epoch 352,012, around 23 October.

Read from the Radix Gateway at epoch 348,533 on 11 October.

The DAO: ratified, not yet active

GP-PRE-1 ratified the Radix DAO Charter and its Governance Framework on 2 October. radixdao.org/govern now marks 21 of its 24 documents "Ratified · v1.0.0 · in force at activation", and says nothing there is in force until an Activation Vote passes; until then community governance is advisory. The Operating Agreement and the certificate of formation read "Signed · not yet in force", and the Roles Registry is still pending.

The Radix Accountability Council, the interim body running the move from the Foundation to the DAO, said on 6 October that the Marshall Islands registration of RADIX DAO LLC is with the registry and in its last stages (RAC update; the incorporation). It also said it would settle the remaining details of the election for a permanent council and open candidacy formally that week. No candidacy post had appeared in its channel by 11 October.

Hyperscale: a deadlock between shards

hyperscale-rs, the Rust implementation of a sharded Radix network that flightofthefox is building, took 39 commits on main on 5 and 6 October (commits). 18 of them, written on 3 October and merged on the 6th, handle a hold cycle: two transactions that each need two shards, which the shards have locked in opposite order, so each waits for a certificate the other cannot give. A shard that can prove the cycle from its own block's state claims aborts the later of the two in hash order. Both shards order the pair the same way, so exactly one transaction is lost and the other proceeds.

The same days changed how signatures are checked: a batch is now verified signature by signature rather than by their sum. hyperscale-vm, its virtual machine, took one commit, on fee holds (commits). In the hyperscale.rs channel he said the VM's cryptography functions have not been started (Telegram), and on 9 October set out who would keep the network's history: today every validator stores it, while in Hyperscale only those running a Gateway or similar service would need an archive node (Telegram). When a member posted Sui's claim of 40 million transactions a second, he answered:

Built this week

Ciggie Puffs went live on mainnet on 9 October (announcement). Its 10,000 NFTs are drawn from one bundle of about 900 KB stored on the ledger, and each one's picture and line of text change with prices on Ociswap, network volume and the wallet holding it, read from the Gateway when it is viewed (collection). None are sold: a third went to CIGGIE holders, a third is set aside for victims of the August drain, and a third is offered to the DAO.

Radix Guild, the task marketplace that opened a week earlier, added a projects board on 8 October, a public backlog where ideas for Radix upgrades can be listed and funded (Telegram). Emma Explains Crypto, a YouTube channel presented by an AI, posted four explainers on Radix, transaction manifests, Hyperscale and Scrypto (channel).

This week on the wiki

The hyperscale-rs article gained a section on disk use and history on 11 October: the per-shard disk figures flightofthefox gave on 9 October and how history would be kept once only archive nodes hold it. It is the page to read alongside this week's argument about who pays to store a sharded network's past. RDX Works now records the winding-up petition HM Revenue & Customs presented against the company on 29 September.

Pages edited in the seven days to 2026-10-11:

The week on the ledger

Read live from the Radix Gateway at epoch 348,532, state version 562,414,104, on 2026-10-11.

The ledger

Three claims settled this week, and the record stands at 12 hit, 3 miss and 3 open (all claims).

• Four fee rises from 23 September: hit, scored 9 October. Radstakes at 40%, RadixStake at 29.89%, Sirius and Polaris at 25%, each as queued.
• RadixTalk at 50%: hit. Effective fee 0.5 at epoch 348,533 on the Gateway and on radixscan; the stored factor still reads 0.015.
• Gate re-enables XRD deposits: miss. Read on the due date, its endpoint still returns deposits disabled on both chains.
• New: Sirius and Polaris charge 50% from epoch 352,012. Due 25 October, settled on each validator's effective fee.

Concentration watch

8 validators hold a third of the active stake, the same count as last week but not the same eight: Weft was sixth on 4 October and dropped out, and Avaunt Staking, at 139.4m XRD, now completes the group. A third is the threshold that matters: a group holding more can stall the network. Counting the four validators from the 23 September transaction as one operator, with 383.0m XRD between them, the number is 7, also unchanged.

What to watch

• About 14 and 15 October: the 131m XRD unstaked from Weft becomes claimable; next week's stake reading shows where any of it goes.
• Epoch 352,012, about 23 October: Sirius and Polaris charge 50%, settled on their effective fee by 25 October.
• By 25 October: a certificate of formation for RADIX DAO LLC from the Marshall Islands, announced by the council or on radixdao.org.

Corrections

Nothing this week.

Next week the Weft XRD becomes claimable and Sirius and Polaris are days from 50%.

Radix Week in Review series, Issue #16: ← Previous: Issue #15, Sep 28 – Oct 4, 2026 · All recaps · Subscribe

Previously: XRD holders ratified the Radix DAO Charter, one account left Polaris ahead of a fee rise, and Radix Guild opened on mainnet.