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Overview

$XRD is the native token of the Radix network. Unlike an ERC-20-style smart-contract token, XRD is a native asset – a first-class resource created and enforced directly by the Radix Engine, moved between vaults rather than by contract-managed balance mappings. The Radix protocol describes XRD as the token “used to pay the network’s required transaction fees and to secure the network through staking to its validator nodes” (Radix Knowledge Base).

Primary Utility

Supply and Emissions

XRD is scheduled to reach a maximum supply of 24 billion tokens. The ceiling lives in the protocol’s emission logic rather than in the resource: read on-ledger, XRD reports supply_fixed: false and mintable: true, with the minter and burner roles permanently locked to a system badge so that only the protocol can create or destroy it (see Radix Economic Model). Of that, 12 billion XRD was created at genesis when the Radix Public Network launched with the Olympia mainnet in 2021, and the remaining 12 billion is being minted as network emissions over roughly 40 years – about 300 million XRD per year – as the incentive for stakers and validators securing the network (Radix Knowledge Base).

Because emissions are gradual and network fees are partly burned, the current total supply sits well below the cap: the on-ledger total supply of the XRD resource was 13,505,461,118.64 XRD at epoch 333342 (state version 547,628,486, 9 August 2026), against 13,513,127,623.88 ever minted and 7,666,505.23 ever burned (Radix Dashboard). The full economics of the emission/burn balance are examined on the Radix Economic Model page.

Some of the holding has left or been pledged. RDX Works and the Foundation both contributed to the 1.5bn XRD Radix Endowment Fund in 2024 (Adam Simmons). In January 2025 RDX pledged XRD as collateral for a loan of up to 10m USD, depositing the first 17m XRD at KuCoin (Piers Ridyard); RDX Holdings said in February 2026 that less than 10% of the facility was drawn (RDX Holdings). RDX Works stopped work at the end of February 2025 (Adam Simmons), and its tokens are owned by its parent, RDX Holdings (Dan Hughes). Dan Hughes said in October 2024 that he would take his own allocation from RDX in full and keep about 10% of its shares (Telegram); it is not public whether that transfer happened before he died in July 2025. Timan Rebel of Astrolescent, who speaks with the company, says his shares and XRD passed to his family, that RDX Holdings acts mostly for the estate, and that its XRD is held with the custodian PrimeVault (Telegram, Telegram).

In January 2026 RDX Holdings said it had no plans to sell, would keep its XRD unstaked, and would within a month move it into public accounts so anyone could check it stayed untouched (Telegram). It promised a figure by the end of that month (Telegram), said through Peachy Keehn that its share of the Endowment Fund was back in its custody, unstaked, with no intention to dispose of it (Telegram), and said in February that it had sold no XRD in the previous year (Telegram). It has published neither the accounts nor a figure, and its group accounts for the year to March 2025, due on 31 March 2026, have not been filed (Companies House).

Transaction Fees and Fee Burning

Every Radix transaction pays a network fee denominated in XRD. Of the base network fee, 50% is permanently burned by the protocol – the tokens are destroyed, not redistributed (Radix Knowledge Base). The other 50% is paid to validators in two equal halves: 25% to the validator that proposed the round the transaction landed in, and 25% shared across the active validator set. Those are the engine constants NETWORK_FEES_PROPOSER_SHARE_PERCENTAGE and NETWORK_FEES_VALIDATOR_SET_SHARE_PERCENTAGE, both set to 25 (radixdlt-scrypto); the burn is not a percentage at all but the remainder left after both are paid. Every mainnet receipt shows it — a 0.75854478253 XRD fee resolves to 0.379272391265 burned with 0.1896361956325 to each side.

Any optional tip a transaction adds is paid in full to the round-leading validator. The burn is the deflationary counterweight to network emissions, but at current volumes it is a small one: 7,666,505.23 XRD has been burned in total against 13,513,127,623.88 ever minted, roughly nine days of issuance at ~300 million XRD a year (see Radix Economic Model).

Staking and Network Security

Radix secures its ledger through delegated proof of stake. XRD holders stake to validator nodes, and at each epoch the protocol selects the top 100 validators by delegated stake to run Cerberus consensus (Radix Docs). Staked XRD is represented by Liquid Stake Units (LSUs) – transferable, DeFi-composable tokens whose redemption value rises as emissions accrue, so staking rewards compound automatically each epoch.

Verifying XRD On-Ledger

XRD is not a contract-deployed token, so it has a single canonical resource address on Radix mainnet:

resource_rdx1tknxxxxxxxxxradxrdxxxxxxxxx009923554798xxxxxxxxxradxrd

Any wallet, explorer, or dApp can read the live supply, holders, and metadata for XRD directly from the ledger at that address – for example via the Radix Dashboard or the Network Gateway API. Because minting and burning of XRD are gated behind a protocol-owned badge (they cannot be performed by any user), the resource’s supply can only change through the emission and fee-burn rules described above.

HydrateLast updated Oct 1, 2026v1.8.011 revisionsVerified Aug 9, 2026