History of Radix

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 BFT consensus protocol specified around braided cross-shard consensus: rather than fixing shard boundaries in advance, it forms a temporary consensus group from the validators of exactly the shards a transaction touches, preserving atomic composability at unlimited parallelism. The Cerberus whitepaper was published in 2020 and underwent academic peer review.

Braiding is a specification rather than a description of a running system. It has never run in production: Babylon mainnet runs Cerberus unsharded, where there is nothing to braid – a configuration equivalent to the original HotStuff – and the Xi’an production candidate does not braid either. The Cerberus page sets out the divergence in full.

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 Radix Foundation’s final public Hyperscale test concluded in January 2026: its reference implementation sustained over 500,000 transactions per second with peaks above 700,000 across more than 590 participating nodes on commodity hardware, and private tests scaled linearly from roughly 250,000 TPS on 64 shards to 500,000 on 128. The software under test was the Foundation’s Hyperscale implementation rather than Cerberus.

Development has since moved to hyperscale-rs, the community-led Rust implementation that is now the Xi’an production candidate. Its execution layer is changing too: on 1 August 2026 the lead developer confirmed that a purpose-built virtual machine is underway to replace the Radix Engine, rather than a sharding retrofit of it – an option he assessed as "not in the ballpark" for sharded operation. Existing dApps are expected to migrate rather than be rebuilt: "best case scenario - contracts will just need a recompile", worst case an automated transpiler. None of this affects Babylon mainnet, which continues to run the Radix Engine.

With that work and the Cuttlefish protocol upgrade adding subintents, Radix is progressing toward Xi'an – the sharded mainnet intended to deliver Dan Hughes' original vision of a ledger that scales to serve the world.

The Composability Gap (2020–2027)

One thread runs through the whole of this timeline, and it is easily lost among the release names. The property Radix was built to deliver — atomic composability across shards, so that a single transaction touching state on many shards either commits everywhere or nowhere — has been demonstrated once, in a prototype, and has never run on a Radix production network.

• December 2020 — the Flexathon, a solo hackathon Hughes ran over his vacation, produced a working demonstration of atomicity and composability across shards under Cerberus. It was shown in a Radix Labs session, Radix Founder Demonstrates Cross Shard Atomic Composability, published 19 May 2021. Hughes' own diary was explicit that the prototype would “not bear any resemblance to any of the networks planned for release on our roadmap”, and no public copy of its source survives.
• 28 July 2021 — Olympia launched with a single shard group and no smart contracts.
• 28 September 2023 — Babylon brought Scrypto, the Radix Engine and smart accounts — and also runs a single shard group. With one shard group there is nothing to shard across: Cerberus reduces to its unsharded case, equivalent to the original HotStuff, and braiding has nothing to braid.
• 2027 — multiple shard groups are scheduled for Xi'an, the date given by the Radix Labs roadmap. The work proceeds in hyperscale-rs, on a purpose-built virtual machine, and takes nothing from the Flexathon build.

Six years separate the demonstration from the network that is meant to run it, and the intervening releases delivered a great deal that was not sharding: an asset-oriented execution environment, a wallet, a DeFi ecosystem. Reading the timeline as a sharding roadmap that slipped misses what actually shipped; reading the demonstrations as production capability overstates what runs today. Both halves belong in the record.

Investors

Saul Klein, co-founder of LocalGlobe, invested $1 million in Radix DLT in 2018. He was removed as a director on 5 June 2023.

External Links

• Radix DLT Official Website
• Radix Blog
• Radix GitHub
• Cerberus Whitepaper
• Consensus Evolution at Radix