Radix Ecosystem Funding

Radix ecosystem funding refers to the family of grant, incubation, and treasury vehicles operated by the Radix Foundation and RDX Works to finance development of the Radix ecosystem. Between 2022 and 2026 five distinct vehicles ran under this umbrella: the cohort-based Radix Grants Program, the Radix Booster Grants – the main dApp funding track, drawn from the 250M XRD ($10M+) Ecosystem Fund – the Radix Foundry Program incubator, the Ecosystem Asset Fund treasury program, and the Radix Endowment Fund. With the Foundation's move to maintenance mode in May 2026, none of these programs appears in the Foundation’s plans, and the treasury that funded them is to pass to a community-led DAO.

Radix Grants Program (2022–2023)

The Booster Grants grew out of the original Radix Grants Program, announced in December 2022 as a cohort-based scheme offering teams $30,000 in XRD alongside structured mentorship from RDX Works. The first cohort, announced in January 2023, selected six teams: AlphaDEX (on-ledger order book exchange), CaviarSwap (decentralized exchange), Foton (NFT marketplace and SDK), Hermes Protocol (on-chain notifications), Ociswap (decentralized exchange), and XRD.domains (the Radix Name Service). Several cohort alumni – Ociswap and XRD.domains among them – went on to receive Babylon Booster Grants, and the cohort model's mentorship-plus-funding formula carried into the Booster tracks described below.

Radix Booster Grants (2023–2026)

The Radix Booster Grants program was the Foundation’s main track for funding decentralized applications (dApps) in the Radix ecosystem. Launched as part of the broader 250M $XRD ($10M+) Ecosystem Fund, it paid developers in $XRD as their dApps reached agreed stages on the Radix network.

The program began on 11 May 2023 as the Babylon Booster Grants, an award of $XRD "with a value of up to $10k USD" for the first dApps to launch at the September 2023 Babylon mainnet upgrade, paid once the dApp was live on mainnet. The award rose during the program. Announcements from 8 December 2023 onward describe it as a $15,000 grant, and the reshape post of 7 February 2024 records the rise in a single word, setting the successor track at "now $15,000 in XRD". That post reshaped the program into four consecutive tracks offering up to $160,000 in $XRD per project, with dedicated marketing, business, and technical support from the RDX Works team.

Grant Tracks

Teams could receive each grant once, with the track tied to a development stage:

• MVP Booster ($5,000) – build a first MVP on Stokenet or as a mainnet beta.

• Launch Booster ($15,000) – launch the product on Babylon mainnet.

• Refine Booster (up to $50,000) – improve a live dApp and grow traction.

• Growth Booster (up to $140,000) – reach seed stage, pitched to the RDX Works ecosystem investment team.

Beyond the tracks, the program offered audit grants, milestone rewards, and fundraising rewards of up to 10% of externally raised funds (capped at $50,000), alongside co-marketing, AWS credits, and Hacken audit discounts. Recipients passed KYC/KYB checks and agreed project milestones before payment. By early 2024 the grants effort had distributed over half a million dollars to builders since February 2023 – roughly $170,000 in Booster Grants, $90,000 in Milestone Rewards, and over $20,000 in developer incentives – across more than 20 funded teams drawn from over 100 applications.

Funded Projects

The Radix Booster Grants program has supported a diverse range of projects, contributing to the growth and development of the Radix ecosystem. These projects span various categories including DeFi, NFTs, gaming, and infrastructure. Below is a list of some of the key projects that have received funding. Every figure in the Grant Amount column is the one stated in that project's own announcement, linked from the cell. Where a row reads not stated, the announcement named no figure; all nine such announcements fall between 3 November and 5 December 2023, before the award rose to $15,000:

Radix Foundry Program (2024–2026)

The Radix Foundry Program was an incubator launched in 2024 by Radix Publishing as part of the Radix ecosystem's $10M development fund. It incubated dApps in categories the Foundation judged high-potential, and measured them by users, Total Value Locked (TVL) and on-chain activity.

Structure and Focus

Foundry projects received up to $250,000 in $XRD along with comprehensive support – marketing assistance, business development guidance, and technical mentorship from the RDX Works leadership team, plus introductions to venture capital firms, exchanges, and market makers, and coordinated go-to-market strategies with Radix Publishing. Teams typically entered through the Booster Grant program, and the fund expected to make up to one Foundry investment per quarter, with projects evaluated on agreed milestones, user growth, TVL, and on-chain activity.

The program followed early DeFi successes on Radix – by early 2024, DEXes like CaviarNine, Ociswap, and DeFi Plaza, together with the WEFT money market, had accumulated more than $30 million in TVL. It targeted seven high-potential categories: lending and borrowing markets, real-world asset tokenization, yield derivatives, professional NFT trading, launchpad services, stablecoins and collateralized debt positions, and liquid staking – the last building on roughly $250 million in Liquid Stake Units already in the ecosystem.

Notable Projects

The Radix Foundry Program announced its first two participant projects in early 2024, selecting initiatives in the perpetual decentralized exchange and NFT trading categories.

Surge

Surge was selected as the first recipient of a Radix Foundry grant to develop a perpetual decentralized exchange (DEX) on the Radix network. The announcement described a team with expertise in mathematics, derivatives trading and quantitative finance, building on lessons from established perpetual platforms such as Drift, GMX, dYdX and Jupiter.

The platform's development addresses a significant market opportunity, as decentralized perpetual markets represent only 2.3% of the total derivatives volume in crypto, compared to 22% for spot trading. By February 2024, Surge had already demonstrated significant traction, with over 100 million CAVIAR tokens locked for their initial token allocation.

On 19 August 2026 CaviarNine, Surge’s lead builder, announced it was winding down its products and leaving Radix, Surge among them. The exchange’s pool has committed no transaction since 27 August 2026; its page records the unwind.

Trove

Trove was selected as the second Foundry recipient to develop professional NFT trading infrastructure. The platform initially launched in late 2023 with basic NFT trading functionality and quickly achieved over 1 million $XRD in traded volume. The project demonstrated early success by facilitating trading for notable NFT collections including Abandoned Scorpions, Radical Robos, $XRD Domains, and ICE404.

Under the Foundry Program, Trove set out to build a platform for professional traders, with real-time data aggregation, visual analytics, floor-price charts, complex trade execution, collection bidding and support for newer NFT standards such as 404-style tokens, dynamic traits and nestable tokens. Trove is now dormant: trove.tools has served nothing since at least 30 July 2026.

Ecosystem Asset Fund (2024–2025)

The Ecosystem Asset Fund was a treasury program run by the Radix Foundation that spent $25,000 per month buying and holding native tokens issued by projects in the Radix ecosystem. It was announced in late 2024, with the first allocation made in December 2024, and ran for about six months before being paused in May 2025. The Foundation described the fund as a way to “boost visibility, deepen liquidity, and convey confidence to builders, community members, and the wider industry in the assets in the Radix ecosystem.”

Structure and Allocation

Each month’s $25,000 was split between two buckets, per the Foundation’s announcement:

• 70% was directed to a weighted index of the top 20 ecosystem tokens by market capitalisation, excluding wrapped assets, XRD, and the Cassie token.
• 30% was directed to a single randomly chosen top-50 ecosystem token.

Tokens acquired by the fund were held for a minimum of six months, which the Foundation framed as a commitment to stability rather than short-term trading.

All purchases were made from a public wallet, allowing the community to independently verify every transaction, and the Foundation committed to publishing monthly activity reports. Both the token selection and the purchase date each month were randomised and front-run resistant, so that market participants could not anticipate and trade ahead of the fund’s buys.

Relationship to the Ecosystem (Grants) Fund

The Ecosystem Asset Fund was distinct from the larger 250 million XRD Radix Ecosystem Fund, the Foundation’s grants programme for funding ecosystem development. Whereas the grants fund funded teams to build, the Asset Fund bought the resulting tokens on the open market. The two ran in parallel as separate initiatives while the Asset Fund was active.

Wind-down

The fund ran for about six months. Its public wallet records monthly purchases from December 2024 through the start of May 2025, after which none were made – only unsolicited airdrops have reached the wallet since, and the accumulated tokens remain held rather than sold.

The program was paused after the early-May 2025 purchase. A Radix Foundation representative (Adam, @Adam_XRD) explained that, following community feedback that the initiative was “a good idea but not being that beneficial overall”, it was paused after running for six months. No formal announcement was made at the time, and the program has not resumed. The wind-down came as the Radix Foundation moved toward handing its operations and treasury to a community-led DAO.

Nothing has left the wallet since. Read at epoch 337,182 / state version 553,218,942 on 22 August 2026, the account’s most recent outbound transaction is still the buying round of 1 May 2025, and every position it took that day is still in place.

Reception and Risks

The fund’s methodology bought whichever tokens ranked highest by market capitalisation, which included speculative memecoins. This drew commentary that public money could end up exposed to projects that were later abandoned. The fund’s own holdings illustrated the risk: between December 2024 and May 2025 it made repeated purchases of DELAY, a memecoin, accumulating roughly 12.5 million tokens for about 143,000 XRD, all of which remained in the fund’s wallet on-chain, unsold. DELAY’s market ranking subsequently fell, and the token now trades at close to nothing: read at the Ociswap API on 5 September 2026 its pool held about $226 of liquidity on seven-day volume of $2.90. The episode illustrated the abandonment risk inherent in allocating to high-volatility memecoins by market capitalisation alone.

Fifteen months of holding turned that single example into a portfolio-wide record. At state version 553,218,942 the wallet holds 590,060.28 XRD and thirty-six other token positions, some of them unsolicited airdrops rather than purchases. Twenty-two of the thirty-six match a project page on this wiki by their on-ledger resource address, counting the address wherever a page carries it rather than in body text alone, and this wiki records twelve of those positions as active, seven as dormant and three as closed. Alongside DELAY sit Radit and XIDAR, both closed, and HUG, Mox Studio, Foton, DogeCubeX, Delphibets, WhyNot and DAN, all dormant. The final round on 1 May 2025 bought 98,252,019 HUG for 160,646.74 XRD and 1,101,381.89 DELAY for 5,961.42 XRD. A ranking by market capitalisation is a snapshot, and it cannot see which of the projects it ranks will still be running a year later; the fund’s frozen holdings now record that answer for the December 2024 ecosystem.

Radix Endowment Fund (2024–present)

The Radix Endowment Fund is a 1.5 billion $XRD fund established in 2024 to support long-term ecosystem growth and provide financial stability for entities involved in the development of the Radix platform. The fund is managed by Brevan Howard Digital, the digital asset investment platform of Brevan Howard, a global hedge fund managing approximately $34 billion in assets.

Structure and Management

The fund was created to establish a sustainable source of funding for ongoing Radix development while reducing reliance on treasury token sales, and to help drive external investment and co-investment into the ecosystem. It operates through a segregated portfolio company that ring-fences the $XRD from the manager's own assets, with multiple boards responsible for fiduciary oversight. Brevan Howard Digital's BH Digital Solutions business manages the assets, which are held in designated accounts at regulated custodian Copper; staking infrastructure is provided by Twinstake.

Strategy and Network Impact

The manager operates under $XRD-based mandates – returns must be generated in $XRD – with a large share of the fund staked via Twinstake above a minimum staking balance requirement, and the remainder deployable into other return-generating strategies. The initial staking position increased net network staking by approximately 620 million $XRD and reduced staking emissions from approximately 7.7% to 6.7% per annum; to preserve decentralisation, the Radix Foundation reduced its own validator nodes by two, unstaking roughly 122 million $XRD. The endowment also supports institutional adoption and strategic partnerships with market infrastructure providers such as Copper and Keyrock and products like Flash Liquidity.

Current Status

On 28 April 2026 the Radix Foundation announced that from May it would move to an essentials-only phase, with development and community management in “MVP mode”. The post names none of the programs above. The one grant it records went to the Radix Accountability Council: $67,000 and 10m XRD, in two stages, to set up the legal entity of a community-led DAO, to which the Foundation’s remaining treasury is to pass once it exists. The DAO’s founding documents are tracked on the Radix DAO Charter page, and how it should fund core functions is the open question on the operating budgets card.

The Ecosystem Asset Fund had already been paused in May 2025. The last public word on the Radix Endowment Fund is the announcement of 2 September 2024 that Brevan Howard Digital would manage it; nothing published since says whether that arrangement still stands. The record above documents the programs as they ran during the active funding era.

Related Pages

• Radix Economic Model – XRD emissions and staking economics
• Radix Foundation – the organisation that operated these programs

External Links

• The New Radix Ecosystem Fund (250M XRD) – The Radix Blog
• Radix Booster Grants: Apply Now – The Radix Blog
• Introducing the Radix Foundry Program – The Radix Blog
• The Radix Endowment Fund – The Radix Blog
• Radix Foundation Ecosystem Asset Fund – The Radix Blog
• Ecosystem Fund Update: New Directions for Growth and Support – The Radix Blog
• Foundation Update: Moving to Maintenance Mode – The Radix Blog