Radix Technology

Introduction

Radix is a layer-one network built around a claim that sounds modest and is not: that a ledger should understand what an asset is. On nearly every other network an asset is a convention – a balance held in a contract’s storage, obeying whatever rules that contract’s author wrote and whatever bugs they left. On Radix, assets are objects the Radix Engine holds and moves itself, and application code can only ask the engine to move them.

Almost everything else in this section follows from that decision, including the parts that are still unfinished.

The stack

Cerberus is the consensus layer, a BFT protocol designed so that transactions touching unrelated state can be agreed in parallel rather than serialized into one chain. Above it the Radix Engine executes transactions against a state model of typed objects, and Scrypto, a dialect of Rust, is how developers write for it.

Core concepts is where the vocabulary lives: resources, buckets, proofs and vaults, badges, components and blueprints. Core protocols covers the layers themselves, and atomic composability is the property the whole arrangement exists to preserve: any two applications can be combined inside one transaction that either wholly succeeds or wholly does not.

The rest of this section

Releases tracks the named mainnets from Olympia through Babylon to Xi’an, and the protocol updates between them. Research holds the thirteen years of consensus designs behind the current one, including the abandoned ones. Comparisons sets Radix against Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos and Polkadot. Operations covers running against the live network.

What is settled and what is not

The execution half of the design is live and has been since Babylon in September 2023. Asset-oriented programming, badges, manifests and the wallet are all in production, and the properties they claim can be checked against mainnet today.

The scalability half is not. Cerberus as specified runs unsharded on mainnet, the braided cross-shard consensus in the whitepaper has never shipped, and the sharded design that motivated the project waits on Xi’an. A reader evaluating Radix should keep those halves apart: one is a shipped system with a track record, the other is a research programme with promising test numbers and no mainnet.