RADIX WikiRADIX Wiki

This page answers the questions people ask when they first meet Radix. Each section gives its answer in the opening two sentences and links to the article that covers the subject in depth. Facts that move, such as the state of the network and of its governance, were checked on 12 and 13 October 2026.

What is Radix DLT and how does it work?

Radix is a public layer-1 network built for decentralized finance: a shared ledger that holds tokens and runs the applications that trade and lend them, kept by independent validators. It works in three layers: the Cerberus consensus protocol orders and finalizes transactions, the Radix Engine executes them, and developers write the applications the engine runs with Scrypto, Radix's Rust SDK.

DLT stands for distributed ledger technology. What sets Radix apart is that the ledger understands assets: a token or NFT is a resource the engine holds and moves itself, rather than a balance written into a smart contract's storage, an approach the wiki covers under asset-oriented programming. The live network is the Babylon release, which went live on 28 September 2023, and the project was founded by Dan Hughes, who died in July 2025. Radix Technology explains how the parts fit together, and History of Radix traces how they got here.

What is $XRD and what is it used for?

$XRD is the native token of Radix, and it is the only token that can pay transaction fees on the network. Holders also stake it to validators to secure consensus, and it is the common trading pair and collateral across Radix DeFi.

$XRD is a native resource with one address, resource_rdx1tknx…radxrd, so any wallet or explorer reads the same supply from the ledger. Read on 12 October 2026, that supply was about 13.55bn $XRD. The genesis supply was 12bn in 2021, and the protocol mints about 300m $XRD a year to stakers and validators, on a schedule that reaches 24bn over roughly 40 years. Only the protocol can mint or burn $XRD, and nobody can freeze or recall it: the ledger locks those rules. Half of every network fee is burned. The $XRD token article covers supply and use, and Radix Economic Model covers the balance between emissions and burning.

How do I get a Radix wallet?

Download the Radix Wallet for iOS or Android from wallet.radixdlt.com; it is a self-custody app built by RDX Works, so the keys stay on your phone. A new account can receive tokens straight away, because Radix accounts exist as addresses before any transaction touches the ledger.

To use a dApp on a desktop browser, install the Radix Connect browser extension and scan its QR code with the wallet, which links the two over an encrypted peer-to-peer connection. The wallet also holds Personas, which log you in to dApps without a password. Since the Radix Foundation moved to maintenance mode in May 2026, the wallet takes bug fixes from volunteers and no new features, until a future direction is set by the community; both apps remain published and installable. Radix Wallet has the detail.

Where can I buy $XRD?

$XRD trades on a small number of centralized exchanges, among them KuCoin, Gate.io and MEXC, and can be swapped for other Radix tokens on the network's own decentralized exchanges. Check the exchange's deposit and withdrawal status before sending funds, because several venues have delisted $XRD and not every one has reopened deposits since the network restarted in September 2026.

Read from each exchange's own API on 13 October 2026, KuCoin had $XRD deposits and withdrawals both enabled, while Gate.io allowed withdrawals to a Radix Wallet and had deposits disabled. How to Buy $XRD lists every venue it has checked, the ones that have stopped trading the token, and how deep each market is.

How does staking work, and what is a validator?

A validator is a node that takes part in consensus, and staking on Radix means delegating $XRD to one in return for a share of the roughly 300m $XRD the protocol emits each year. At each epoch, a period of about five minutes, the 100 registered validators with the most delegated stake form the active set that proposes and votes on rounds.

Delegating takes a minimum of 100 $XRD and is done through the Radix Dashboard. In return you hold Liquid Stake Units (LSUs), a token unique to each validator that represents your stake and gains value as rewards accrue, so rewards compound without any action. Each validator keeps a fee of 0 to 100% of the rewards its stake earns; a fee rise takes about two weeks to apply, which gives delegators time to leave. Unstaking takes 2,016 epochs, about a week. Radix does not confiscate stake for bad behaviour: a validator that misses rounds loses that epoch's rewards instead. On 12 October 2026 mainnet had 187 registered validators. The validator subsidy the Foundation used to pay ended in June 2026, so validators now live on their fees. Validator Nodes and Staking go further.

What are transaction fees on Radix?

Every Radix transaction pays a network fee in $XRD, priced from a fixed table for the computation and storage it uses rather than by an auction between senders. Half of the network fee is burned, a quarter goes to the validator that proposed the round, and a quarter is shared across the active validator set.

The network fee has three parts: execution and finalization, each charged at 0.00000005 $XRD per cost unit, and storage, charged per byte written; the prices are constants in the radixdlt-scrypto source. A sender can add an optional tip, which goes entirely to the proposing validator, and code authors can charge royalties each time their component is called. The wallet shows the total before you sign. A fee is paid by whichever component locks it, so a dApp can pay its users' fees itself. Transaction Fees works through the model and a live receipt.

What is the Radix Engine, and what is asset-oriented programming?

The Radix Engine is the software every Radix node uses to execute transactions, and asset-oriented programming is the model it enforces: tokens, NFTs and badges are resources the engine holds and moves, not numbers kept in a smart contract's storage. Because only the engine moves assets, an application can transfer only what it holds, which removes the token approvals that ERC-20 contracts depend on and reentrancy through a transfer.

Resources sit in vaults, travel between components in buckets, and their rules, such as who may mint, burn or recall them, are set when they are created. Permission is shown by presenting a proof of a badge, a token that acts as a key. The trade-off is that a flaw in the engine reaches every account at once, which is what happened in August 2026 (see below). Asset-Oriented Programming and Radix Engine cover both.

What is a transaction manifest?

A transaction manifest is the list of instructions a Radix transaction carries, written as named steps such as withdrawing tokens from an account, handing them to a component and depositing what comes back. The Radix Wallet reads the manifest to show which assets will leave and arrive before you sign, instead of asking you to approve an encoded function call you cannot read.

A manifest has no loops or branches, and it executes atomically: every step commits or none does. That lets one transaction combine several applications, such as a swap on one exchange and a deposit into a lending pool, with no code written to connect them, the property Radix calls atomic composability. Transaction Manifests and Blind Signing and Transaction Manifests cover the format.

How does the Cerberus consensus protocol work?

Cerberus is the Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocol specified for Radix in 2020, meaning validators keep agreeing on one history even when some of them fail or lie; its design splits the ledger into shards and agrees each transaction among only the shards it touches. On mainnet it runs as a single unsharded instance, where it is equivalent to the HotStuff protocol, so the cross-shard part of the design has never run in production.

In the specification, each transaction names the pieces of state it will read and write. The validators responsible for those shards form a temporary group for that transaction and commit it in three phases, so transactions touching unrelated state proceed in parallel and only overlapping ones wait for each other. Radix calls this braiding. The academic version of the protocol, written with researchers at the University of California, Davis, was posted to arXiv in 2020 and peer-reviewed in the Journal of Systems Research in 2023. The leading candidate for sharded Radix does not implement Cerberus: it uses a consensus derived from HotStuff-2 within each shard. Cerberus (Consensus Protocol) sets out both papers and what runs today.

What is Hyperscale, and when will Radix be sharded?

Hyperscale is Radix's work toward a sharded network, and in a public test on 31 January 2026 the Radix Foundation's implementation sustained 500,000 transactions per second, with peaks above 700,000, across 128 shards. Sharding has not reached mainnet: it is planned for a release called Xi’an, which has no release date.

A private test the same week ran about 250,000 transactions per second on 64 shards and 500,000 on 128, so doubling the shards doubled the throughput. The Foundation closed its interim Hyperscale phase in February 2026. The work continues in hyperscale-rs, a community Rust implementation led by flightofthefox of Proven Network, whose RFC for delivering Xi’an went to the governance forum on 20 April 2026 with an 18-month target; its first milestone was reported complete on 7 August 2026. hyperscale-rs replaces the Radix Engine with a purpose-built virtual machine, hyperscale-vm, so existing contracts would need rebuilding from source. Its lead developer has also said the January test used very small committees of validators per shard, and that at the size Xi’an targets, about 100 validators per shard, the older design would saturate a data centre's bandwidth at a fraction of that throughput. Hyperscale: 500K TPS Public Test has the test in full.

What is Scrypto and how do I start building on Radix?

Scrypto is Radix's software development kit for Rust: a library, a set of macros and command-line tools that compile an ordinary Rust crate into a WebAssembly package the Radix Engine runs. To start, install Rust, the WebAssembly target and the radix-clis tools, or open the official Scrypto Starter dev container, then follow the Getting Started guides from a first blueprint to a deployment.

A blueprint is the code, much like a class, and each instance of it on the ledger is a component. The current release is Scrypto v1.4.0 of 7 September 2026, the Eagle Ray release, and radix-clis 1.4.0 on crates.io matches it. The three guides run from installing Scrypto through your first blueprint to deploying to Stokenet and mainnet; Stokenet is the public test network. Building on Radix lays out what to learn after that, and Radix's own Learning Step-by-Step course covers the same ground. Scrypto explains what will change for contracts when Xi’an arrives.

Where can I find an up-to-date overview of projects building on Radix?

radix.wiki's ecosystem directory lists the projects built on Radix or serving it, each with a status that records whether its team still operates it. On 13 October 2026 it held 153 entries, 57 of them marked active, and its status filter shows only those.

Each entry records the project's category, such as finance, NFT platform, DAO platform or infrastructure, along with its website, team and tokens, and the directory can be filtered by status and by category. An entry stays after its project stops, marked dormant or closed, so the directory is also a record of what has ended. A status is judged by whether the people behind a project still run it, not by whether its website still loads.

Who runs Radix now?

No single company runs Radix: independent node runners operate its validators, and control of its shared assets is moving from the Radix Foundation to a community-owned DAO governed by $XRD holders. The Foundation entered maintenance mode in May 2026, and a five-member Radix Accountability Council, elected by 1,151 accounts in February 2026, is steering the handover.

Votes are weighted by $XRD held, one $XRD to one vote, read from a snapshot of balances so nobody has to lock or move tokens. On 2 October 2026 holders ratified the Radix DAO Charter and Governance Framework, with 100% approval on a turnout above the required quorum. The DAO's legal entity, RADIX DAO LLC, is being registered in the Marshall Islands; the council said on 6 October that registration was in its last stages. Ratification also starts a 90-day window to elect a permanent council that replaces the transition one. Proposals and votes are published at radixdao.org. Radix Governance covers the structure, and the Radix DAO Charter card tracks the founding documents.

Why did the Radix network stop in 2026?

On 31 August 2026 someone used a flaw in the Radix Engine to withdraw tokens from accounts they did not own, emptying the network of its Hyperlane-bridged assets in 26 transactions, and that evening the node runners halted mainnet so the flaw could not be used again. Mainnet restarted on 11 September 2026 with the Eagle Ray protocol update, which closes the flaw, after 254 hours down.

Bridged assets are wrapped copies of tokens from other blockchains, such as USDC, brought onto Radix through a bridge called Hyperlane. The engine accepted a reference to any vault as long as it was a vault, without checking who owned it. Eagle Ray, released as Scrypto v1.4.0, adds a check before every method call that the caller may invoke the object it names, and a blueprint written to repeat the drain was rejected after the restart. A governance vote that closed on 4 October 2026 directs bridged USDC collateral held back from the drain to the original holders if it is recovered. Hyperlane Asset Drain and Network Halt records the incident, the fix and the recovery, and Radix Protocol Updates explains how Eagle Ray was enacted.

What is radix.wiki and how can I edit it?

radix.wiki is an independent wiki about Radix, covering the protocol, its history, guides for developers and the projects in its ecosystem, with 383 pages on 13 October 2026. Anyone can read it; to edit, you log in with the Radix Wallet and hold a minimum balance of $XRD, which the wiki checks and never spends.

Editing an existing page needs 20,000 $XRD, or 10,000 on the ideas board. Creating a page needs 10,000 $XRD in most sections, 20,000 in the ecosystem directory and 50,000 on the blog, where essays can be edited only by their authors, and commenting needs 10,000. Login uses ROLA, in which the wallet signs a one-time challenge to prove it controls the account. Every edit is saved as a versioned revision with its own history, and articles are held to the editorial policy: verifiable sources and a neutral point of view. AI agents can read the wiki through its MCP server, and every page has a Markdown copy at its own address with .md added.

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