Core Concepts

An Access Controller is a native blueprint that holds a smart account 's owner badge in a vault and hands out proofs of it under rules the ledger enforces.

An access rule is the unit of authorization on Radix. It is data attached to an object by the Role Assignment module, not code inside a component, and it is…

Asset-oriented programming makes tokens, NFTs and badges native objects that the Radix Engine manages, not balances kept in a smart contract’s storage.

Atomic composability means a transaction that calls several applications completes every step or none of them, as a Radix transaction manifest does.

A badge is a resource shown as proof of authority: the engine checks a proof of it, then discards the proof, and the badge never moves.

Blind signing is approving a transaction whose effects you cannot read. A Radix transaction manifest shows the wallet what will happen before you sign.

The blockchain trilemma, popularized by Vitalik Buterin, holds that a blockchain can optimize for only two of scalability, security and decentralization.

Blueprints define logic and policy, packages deploy them, components instantiate them. A published package cannot be changed.

Radix's asset-oriented programming model uses three core container types: Permanent storage for resources.

Byzantine fault tolerance lets a distributed system reach agreement even when up to a third of its nodes are faulty, offline or malicious.

A central bank digital currency (CBDC) is a digital form of money issued by a central bank as its own direct liability.

On Radix, a component is a runtime instance of a blueprint, with its own persistent state, its own globally-addressable identity, and its own configured access…

Component Royalties allow Scrypto blueprint authors to earn fees whenever their deployed components are used.

Composability is the ability of one application to use another as a part: to call its code, hold its assets and pass its output to something else.

The Consensus Manager is a native blueprint that exposes the network’s consensus state – current epoch, round, validator set, and emissions schedule – to…

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is the set of financial services, such as trading, lending and borrowing, that run as software on a public blockchain.

Delegated proof of stake (DPoS) lets token holders delegate tokens to validators for a share of staking rewards. Radix uses it to choose its validator set.

A finite state machine is a model of computation that is always in one of a fixed set of states and moves between them only through defined transitions.

The honest majority assumption is the premise, behind proof of work and proof of stake, that most mining or staking power follows the protocol rules.

Liquid stake units (LSUs) are native Radix tokens for XRD staked with one validator. Their value in XRD rises as staking rewards accrue.

The Locker is a native blueprint for permissioned resource distribution: a sender deposits resources into the locker addressed to specific recipients, who can…

The Metadata module is one of the engine's pluggable object modules. Every globalized object – packages, components, resources, accounts – has a Metadata…

EVM tokens need an approve() allowance before a contract can move them. Radix assets are native resources that move between vaults, so no allowance exists.

The Radix network mints new XRD as network emissions to reward the validators and stakers who secure the ledger.

As AI agents increasingly manage financial operations autonomously, the underlying ledger's architecture becomes critical.

Radix governance is the set of institutions, rules, and processes by which decisions about the Radix network and its shared resources – its treasury…

Radix's native pool blueprints – OneResourcePool, TwoResourcePool, and MultiResourcePool – provide canonical liquidity-pool primitives implemented in native…

A resource is the Radix Engine 's first-class representation of a digital asset.

The Role Assignment module is the native object module that stores an object's permissions.

A rollup executes transactions off a layer-1 chain and posts their data to it. Optimistic rollups rely on fraud proofs, zk rollups on validity proofs.

Shard groups [/ʃɑrd grups/] or Validator Sets on Radix are groups of validators responsible for storing and validating the ledger state on subsets of the Radix…

Sharding splits a network’s processing and storage across smaller groups of nodes, each handling part of the transactions and state, so capacity can grow.

A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency built to hold a stable value, usually a peg to the US dollar, most often by holding reserve assets against it.

Staking is locking up cryptocurrency tokens to help secure a proof-of-stake network, in return for rewards paid as additional tokens.

Pre-authorizations – the user-facing name for subintents – allow "a partial transaction to be authorized by one actor such that it can then become a part of a…

The Substate Model is Radix's approach to storing and managing on-ledger state. Rather than using a global account-based model (Ethereum) or UTXOs (Bitcoin)…

The Transaction Processor is the native blueprint that turns a transaction manifest into engine calls.

The Transaction Tracker is a system-level native blueprint that records the status of every transaction submitted to the network – including its intent hash…

Transactions per second (TPS) is the number of transactions a network can process in one second, the usual measure of a blockchain’s throughput.

A trust boundary [/trʌst ˈbaʊndəri/] is the point in a system where the level of trust changes: on one side a component can rely on how the rest behaves, and…

The unspent transaction output (UTXO) model tracks ownership as outputs that are each spent once, in full. The Radix Engine uses its own variant of it.

Validator nodes run Radix’s Cerberus consensus, process transactions and earn staking rewards for themselves and the XRD holders who delegate to them.

The worktop is the resource staging area that exists for the life of a single transaction intent.