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, the grant and incubation programs stopped taking new intakes; the Endowment Fund continues under external management.

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 is a funding initiative designed to support and accelerate the development of decentralized applications (dApps) within the Radix ecosystem. Launched as part of the broader 250M $XRD ($10M+) Ecosystem Fund, this program aims to foster innovation and growth in the Radix network by providing financial support to developers and entrepreneurs.

The program began in mid-2023 as the Babylon Booster Grants, a $15,000 award in $XRD for the first dApps to launch at the September 2023 Babylon mainnet upgrade. In March 2024 it was reshaped 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:

Radix Foundry Program (2024–2026)

The Radix Foundry Program is an incubator initiative launched in 2024 by Radix Publishing as part of the Radix ecosystem's $10M development fund. The program aims to incubate decentralized applications (dApps) in high-potential categories to drive significant growth in users, Total Value Locked (TVL), and on-chain activity within the Radix ecosystem.

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 project is being developed by a team with expertise in mathematics, derivatives trading, and quantitative finance. Surge aims to build upon lessons learned 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.

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 is developing an enhanced platform focused on professional traders, featuring real-time data aggregation, visualized analytics, and improved collection liquidity. The upgraded platform plans to include floor price charting tools, complex trade execution, customizable trading interfaces, collection bidding capabilities, and competitive fee structures. The project also aims to support emerging NFT standards within the ecosystem, such as 404-style tokens, dynamic traits, and nestable tokens.

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.

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 in April 2026 the project’s social channels were deleted and its founder became inactive — developments that community members characterised as a rug pull. The episode illustrated the abandonment risk inherent in allocating to high-volatility memecoins by market capitalisation alone.

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

In April 2026 the Radix Foundation announced it was moving to maintenance mode from May 2026, under which active development and community operations run at a minimal footprint. Foundation-run funding programs – the Booster Grants and the Foundry Program – are no longer taking new intakes, and stewardship of ecosystem funding has passed to the community. The Ecosystem Asset Fund had already been paused in May 2025 following community feedback, and the Radix Endowment Fund continues to operate under external management by Brevan Howard Digital. Builders seeking funding should follow current community-run channels and the Radix blog for the latest. 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