Radix Technology

Introduction

Radix is a layer-one network on which the ledger itself holds and moves assets. On most other networks a token is a balance stored inside a smart contract, and it follows whatever rules, and carries whatever bugs, that contract’s author wrote. On Radix a token is a resource: an object the Radix Engine creates, keeps in vaults and moves itself, so application code moves a resource by asking the engine to and never edits a balance directly.

This section covers how that design works, what of it runs on mainnet today, and what is still being built.

The stack

Cerberus is the consensus layer, a BFT protocol whose sharded design lets transactions that touch unrelated state be agreed in parallel. Mainnet runs it unsharded, as a single shard group, which makes it a variant of the original HotStuff protocol. Above it the Radix Engine executes transactions against a state model of typed objects. Developers write for the engine in Rust with Scrypto, Radix’s Rust SDK: a library of types and macros, and a command-line tool that compiles a blueprint to WebAssembly.

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 has been live 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. Mainnet has taken four protocol updates since launch, the latest Eagle Ray on 11 September 2026.

The scalability half is not live. The braided cross-shard consensus in the Cerberus whitepaper has never shipped, and sharding waits on Xi’an. The leading candidate for Xi’an, hyperscale-rs, does not implement Cerberus: each of its shards runs a consensus derived from HotStuff-2, and it replaces the Radix Engine with a purpose-built virtual machine, hyperscale-vm. Its milestones and current status are on the hyperscale-rs page.