Radix vs Ethereum

Introduction

Ethereum is the most widely adopted smart contract platform, with the largest ecosystem of dApps, developers, and total value locked. Radix is a purpose-built DeFi platform designed to address Ethereum's limitations in scalability, security, and developer experience. This article compares their architectures objectively.

Smart Contract Model

Ethereum: EVM + Solidity

Ethereum uses the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) executing Solidity bytecode. Tokens are implemented as smart contracts (ERC-20, ERC-721) — a token is fundamentally a mapping of balances inside a contract's storage. This design has enabled massive innovation but also produces well-known vulnerabilities: reentrancy attacks, approval exploits (approve/transferFrom), and accidental token loss from sending to contracts without withdrawal functions.

Radix: Radix Engine + Scrypto

Radix uses the Radix Engine executing Scrypto (compiled to WebAssembly). Assets are native platform primitives that behave like physical objects — they cannot be copied, accidentally destroyed, or lost. Reentrancy is impossible by design, and there is no approval pattern. The engine enforces resource conservation at the platform level.

State Model & Scalability

Ethereum: Account Model + L2 Rollups

Ethereum uses a global account model where every transaction can potentially touch any contract's state. This requires total global ordering of all transactions, creating a fundamental throughput bottleneck (~15 TPS on L1). Ethereum's scaling strategy relies on Layer-2 rollups (Optimistic and ZK) that process transactions off-chain and post proofs to L1, fragmenting liquidity and composability across L2s.

Radix: Substate Model + Native Sharding

Radix uses a substate model where state is decomposed into discrete records mapped to shards. Transactions specify which substates they need via intent-based manifests, enabling parallel processing. Cerberus "braids" consensus across shards only when needed, providing linear scalability while preserving atomic composability — no fragmentation.

Accounts & Transactions

Accounts

Ethereum has two account types: Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) controlled by private keys and smart contract accounts. ERC-4337 adds account abstraction via UserOperations, a separate mempool, Bundler nodes, and an EntryPoint contract — significant additional complexity. On Radix, every account is natively a Smart Account Component with built-in multi-factor auth, social recovery, and configurable deposit rules.

Transactions

Ethereum transactions contain opaque calldata that wallets cannot meaningfully display to users — users sign data they cannot understand. Radix Transaction Manifests are human-readable instruction scripts that the Radix Wallet can parse and display, showing users exactly what a transaction will do before they sign.

Ecosystem & Maturity

Ethereum has clear advantages in ecosystem size: thousands of dApps, hundreds of thousands of developers, and hundreds of billions in TVL. Its EVM has become the de facto standard, supported by major L2s (Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, zkSync), tooling (Hardhat, Foundry, OpenZeppelin), and institutional adoption.

Radix's ecosystem is significantly smaller but growing. Its advantage lies in architectural design — purpose-built for DeFi rather than retrofitted — with fewer smart contract vulnerabilities by design and a developer experience that reduces complexity for financial applications. The trade-off is a smaller developer community, fewer tools, and less battle-tested infrastructure.

External Links

• Comparing Account Abstraction and Radix Smart Accounts — Radix Blog
• How Radix Engine is Designed to Scale dApps — Radix Blog
• Ethereum Developer Documentation