Origins (2013–2017)
Dan Hughes began working on what would become Radix in 2013 under the name eMunie. His goal was to create a decentralized ledger capable of scaling to serve the entire world's financial transactions — a problem he recognized existing blockchains could never solve with their single-threaded architectures.
Hughes explored numerous consensus approaches over several years, including Tempo, a DAG-based consensus mechanism. These early experiments laid the groundwork for understanding the fundamental requirements of a scalable distributed ledger: parallelism, deterministic execution, and composability.
Cerberus and RDX Works (2018–2020)
By 2018, Hughes and the growing team developed Cerberus, a novel BFT consensus protocol that braids consensus across shards, enabling unlimited parallelism while preserving atomic composability. The Cerberus whitepaper was published in 2020 and underwent academic peer review.
The company was formalized as RDX Works, with offices in London. The team grew to include specialists in distributed systems, programming language design, and formal verification.
Olympia Mainnet (2021)
The Olympia mainnet launched in July 2021, establishing the Radix network with basic token transfers and staking. While Olympia was intentionally limited in scope (no smart contracts), it demonstrated the network's validator infrastructure and XRD tokenomics.
Babylon Mainnet (2023)
The Babylon upgrade in September 2023 was Radix's transformative release, introducing:
- Scrypto — Radix's asset-oriented programming language
- Radix Engine — deterministic execution environment with native assets
- Transaction Manifests — human and machine readable transactions
- Smart Accounts — programmable accounts with access rules
- Radix Wallet — with Personas and dApp connections
Babylon enabled the rapid growth of a DeFi ecosystem including CaviarNine, Ociswap, Weft Finance, and dozens of other projects.
Dan Hughes (1974–2025)
Dan Hughes, the founder and visionary behind Radix, passed away on July 27, 2025. His death was a profound loss for the Radix community and the broader distributed systems field. Hughes had dedicated over a decade to solving the scalability trilemma, and his work on Cerberus consensus represents one of the most significant contributions to distributed ledger research.
In the months following his passing, the Radix community demonstrated remarkable resilience:
- The Radix Accountability Council was established through community election
- Hyperscale-RS, a community-led implementation, continued development
- The Xi'an roadmap was maintained and advanced by Radix Labs
- The DeFi ecosystem continued to grow and mature
Hughes' vision of a scalable, composable, asset-oriented ledger lives on in the protocol he created and the community he inspired.
Road to Xi'an (2025–2027)
The Hyperscale 500k TPS test in late 2025 validated the scalability thesis. Led by team member Timan after Dan's passing, the test demonstrated 500,000+ sustained TPS across 590+ nodes on commodity hardware.
With the open-sourcing of Hyperscale code and the Cuttlefish protocol upgrade adding subintents, Radix is progressing toward Xi'an — the fully sharded mainnet that will deliver Dan Hughes' original vision of a ledger that scales to serve the world.