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 enfo…

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…

Asset-oriented programming is Radix's foundational design principle where digital assets (tokens, NFTs, badges) are native primitives managed by the R…

Atomic composability means that complex multi-step operations either execute completely or not at all. It is the strict form of composability, the abi…

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 the practice of signing transactions whose effects you cannot verify. On Ethereum, users routinely approve transactions that are opaq…

The blockchain trilemma, popularized by Ethereum 's Vitalik Buterin, states that a blockchain can only optimize for two of three properties: scalabili…

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. Every account, component, and dApp stores i…

Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) is the property of a distributed system that enables it to reach consensus even when up to one-third of participating…

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

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. This is enforced at the Radix Engine lev…

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

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

Decentralized Finance, commonly referred to as DeFi is an umbrella term for a variety of financial applications in blockchain or cryptocurrency geared…

Decentralized Science (DeSci) refers to an emerging model of organizing and funding scientific research in a more open, collaborative, and decentraliz…

Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) is a Sybil protection mechanism invented by Dan Larimer and used by certain distributed ledgers, including Radix. In D…

Finite state machines (FSMs) are a model of computation in which a system occupies exactly one of a finite set of states at a time and moves between t…

The Honest Majority Assumption is a critical security premise that underlies Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Sybil defense mechanisms. Th…

Liquid Stake Units (LSUs) are native Radix tokens representing staked XRD with a specific validator. Unlike liquid staking on other chains (Lido's stE…

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

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

On Ethereum and other EVM chains, using DeFi requires the token-approval pattern: before a contract can move a user’s ERC-20 tokens it must first be g…

The Radix network mints new XRD as network emissions to reward the validators and stakers who secure the ledger. Roughly 300 million XRD is emitted pe…

As AI agents increasingly manage financial operations autonomously, the underlying ledger's architecture becomes critical. Radix provides four propert…

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…

A resource is the Radix Engine 's first-class representation of a digital asset. Unlike token contracts on EVM-style chains – where balances are bookk…

The Role Assignment module is the native object module that stores an object's permissions. Every globalized object carries one, and its state is deli…

A rollup is a layer-2 blockchain scaling construction in which transactions are executed outside the base blockchain (the layer 1) while the data requ…

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

Sharding [/ˈʃɑːdɪŋ/] is a method of partitioning a database horizontally across separate servers to improve scalability, performance and data availabi…

A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency designed to maintain a stable value, most commonly by targeting a fixed exchange rate – a peg – against a reference a…

Staking is a crucial mechanism in many cryptocurrency systems, particularly those using Proof of Stake (PoS) or Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consen…

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 p…

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 (Bi…

The Transaction Processor is the native blueprint that turns a transaction manifest into engine calls. Every user transaction on Radix begins in it: i…

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

Transactions per second (TPS) is a key metric of the speed and scalability of payment and distributed ledger (DLT) networks. High TPS enables networks…

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 behav…

The Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) model is a way to track ownership of digital assets in cryptocurrency systems. The Radix Engine implements a nov…

Validator nodes secure the Radix network by participating in Cerberus consensus. They process transactions, propose state changes, and earn staking re…

The worktop is the resource staging area that exists for the life of a single transaction intent. When a manifest withdraws tokens from an account, th…