Radix Compared

Radix makes choices that have no counterpart on most networks: assets are engine primitives rather than balances inside contracts, authority is carried by badges that are themselves resources, and the state model is sharded by design rather than by appended rollups. Described in isolation those choices read as a list of adjectives, so each page here takes one network the reader already knows and works out where Radix diverges, what the divergence buys and what it costs.

How to read them

Radix vs Ethereum is the load-bearing one, because the account-and-contract model is the picture most readers arrive with. All of these pages are written on a wiki about Radix, so read them with the caution that deserves: where a claim is contested or a Radix feature has not shipped they say so, and Radix’s branch of the architectural fork is the one with the least mainnet evidence behind it.

The pages compare Radix with other smart-contract platforms; there is no Radix vs Bitcoin page. Felix Irresberger, Kose John, Peter Mueller and Fahad Saleh, in a study of the universe of public blockchains over time, define modern blockchains as those that are environmentally sustainable and support smart contracts, and find that the vast majority of non-trivial economic activity on public blockchains happens on them.

References

1. Irresberger, Felix; John, Kose; Mueller, Peter and Saleh, Fahad (2020, revised 2023). The Public Blockchain Ecosystem: An Empirical Analysis. NYU Stern School of Business working paper, SSRN 3592849.