Radix has been developed through 6 major iterations since its inception in 2013, beginning with a blockchain model and culminating with a fixed shard space and Cerberus.
Timeline
KEY DATES | EVENT |
|---|---|
1979-07 | Daniel Patrick Hughes was born in Stoke-on-Trent, England. |
1984 | Hughes’ father bought him a Spectrum Zx81 computer, which sparked his interest in coding. |
2008-02-25 | Hughes incorporated KDB Technology, a mobile technology company. |
2011 | Having just sold his third software company, Hughes discovered Bitcoin and began mining, creating test networks, and experimenting with RPC tools. He had previously developed software for NFC-based mobile payments. |
2012 | Hughes set up a private global Bitcoin network with servers in Australia, Europe, and the USA. With block size limits removed, the network failed at 400–500 tps and ceased functioning at 700 tps. |
2013 | Hughes forked the Bitcoin code to achieve a maximum of 1000 transactions per second (tps). |
2013-2016 | Hughes developed eMunie |
2016-12-02 | Hughes and Piers Ridyard incorporated Surematics, decentralised deal-room software for insurance companies. |
2017-07-13 | RDX Works incorporated. |
2019-06-11 | |
2019-07-16 | Radix Foundation incorporated. |
2021-07-28 | Radix ‘Olympia’ Mainnet launched. |
2021-12-15 | Radix ‘Alexandria’ developer environment launched. |
2023-09-28 | Radix ‘Babylon’ Mainnet launched. |
Development History
From 2013, Dan Hughes began to experiment with various data structures and consensus mechanisms. Each iteration led to insights that have informed the current Radix architecture.
Pre-Radix: Bitcoin Stress Testing (2012)
Before beginning work on Radix, Hughes set up a private global Bitcoin network with servers in Australia, Europe, and the USA. He removed all block size limits and flooded the network with random transactions. At 400–500 transactions per second the network began to fail, and at 700 tps it ceased functioning entirely. Hughes attributed this natural limit to CAP theorem and the finite speed of information transfer across a global network.
Radix Iteration 1: Blockchain (700-1000 tps)
In 2013, Hughes forked the Bitcoin codebase and experimented with different permutations of block size, block times, and hardware. These experiments established that the practical limit of blockchain throughput is approximately 700-1000 tps. A simple comparison with Visa at 24,000 tps meant that blockchains would never work as a global payments rail.
Further Reading
eMunie
Main Article: eMunie
eMunie was Hughes’ attempt to create a blockchain platform that would crack the trilemma of security, scalability, and speed. Although it consistently achieved 400 transactions per second and contained built-in mailing systems, chat rooms, and a proprietary marketplace, Hughes realized it still fell short.
Radix Iteration 2: Blocktree (200 tps)
The limits of monolithic blockchains led to Hughes’ first experiments with sharding in the form of a ‘blocktree’: a data structure of multiple, branching blockchains. At this stage, every branch had its own trust boundary, necessitating a complex messaging system to communicate between them. This led to the insight of grouping related transactions together into the same branch. Unfortunately, at around 200tps, any disagreements between branches led to an exponential rise in message complexity as the states reorganized.
Radix Iteration 3: Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) (1500 tps)
Following on from projects like IOTA, Hughes started exploring Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), which allow for parallel, asynchronous processing of transactions. This was also a move away from Proof-of-work (PoW) sybil protection. Ultimately, the lack of coordination between nodes made the DAG vulnerable to double-spend attacks.
Further Reading
Radix Iteration 4: Channeled Asynchronous State Tree (CAST) (2300 tps)
In an effort to contain the message complexity of blocktrees, a CAST separates ledger state from data availability by hosting the former on a blocktree and the latter in a DAG. The way that CAST uses lightweight merkle representations of node votes has been retained but, though an improvement on previous attempts, any network latency still led to an exponential rise in message complexity.
Radix Iteration 5: Tempo (1.4m tps)
Tempo was the fifth iteration of code since 2013 and led to Hughes being accepted into Y Combinator in 2017. Around this time the project changed its name from eMunie to Radix. The key insight behind Tempo was the Logical Clock: by giving every node a Logical Clock, a tamper-proof record of the relative ordering of all network events could be maintained as a continuous, asynchronous stream without periodic state updates.
Further Reading
Radix Iteration 6: Cerberus (10m tps)
Cerberus uses Tempo’s pre-defined shardspace concept but also builds on a number of well-proven cryptographic primitives, giving strong guarantees around safety, liveness and well-defined security bounds. This combines to create a unique BFT-style agreement process enabling scalability alongside security. Importantly for the Weak Atom problem, the security bounds of this can be well-proven and gives strong guarantees around safety and finality.
Cerberus has been peer reviewed up to 10m tps on 1024 shards.
Early Team (2017)
By the end of 2017, the Radix team comprised six members:
Dan Hughes — Chief Technology Officer. Prior to discovering Bitcoin in 2011, Hughes helped develop software for NFC-based mobile payments and had built, run, and exited three successful software startups.
Piers Ridyard — Chief Executive Officer. Began experimenting with insurance smart contracts on blockchain in early 2015. Co-founded Surematics (YCombinator S’17), which built the world’s first decentralised dataroom on the Radix ledger.
Robert Olsen — Chief Operating Officer. A crypto investor and blockchain evangelist since 2012, handling operations, marketing, PR, and community communications.
Stephen Thornton — Research Scientist. Following a career in scientific research at Cambridge University, Thornton researched applications of Graph Theory and Special Relativity to the Radix network.
Marc Rubio — Developer. An Android developer with a master’s in electronic engineering, involved in the crypto community since 2013.
Zalán Blénessy — Developer Operations. Previously helped ST Ericsson create mobile operating systems and contracted for Apple on hyper-scale deployment.