Radix Economic Model

Overview

The Radix economic model is the set of rules that decide where XRD comes from and where it goes. There are only three flows, and each obeys a different rule:

Emissions mint new XRD at the end of every epoch and hand it to the active validator set in proportion to stake (Network Emissions).
Network fees take XRD out of circulation and out of the payer's account, splitting it three ways – half destroyed, half paid to validators.
Royalties move XRD from a caller to a component or package owner without touching the split at all (Component Royalties).

Every parameter below is a constant in the radixdlt-scrypto engine rather than a policy someone administers, and every figure is checked against mainnet at the epoch stated in the infobox. Where this page and a marketing summary disagree, the ledger is the authority.

Where a fee goes

A Radix transaction fee is not one number. The engine records it in five parts – execution, finalization, storage, tipping and royalty – and only the first three count as network fees (fee_summary.rs). Those three are then divided by fixed percentages:

25% to the proposer – the validator that proposed the round the transaction landed in (NETWORK_FEES_PROPOSER_SHARE_PERCENTAGE).
25% to the validator set, shared across the active set (NETWORK_FEES_VALIDATOR_SET_SHARE_PERCENTAGE).
The remainder is burned. The engine does not carry a burn percentage at all: to_burn_amount() is defined as everything left after the proposer and the set are paid, which at 25 and 25 leaves exactly half.

Tips are the exception. TIPS_PROPOSER_SHARE_PERCENTAGE is 100 and TIPS_VALIDATOR_SET_SHARE_PERCENTAGE is 0 (transaction_execution.rs), so a tip is paid whole to the proposer and none of it is destroyed. A tip buys priority from one validator; it does not add to the burn.

The split is observable on any transaction. Four consecutive mainnet user transactions between 02:51 and 03:05 UTC on 9 August 2026 each reported to_burn at exactly half of network fees with to_proposer and to_validator_set equal at a quarter each – for example a 0.75854478253 XRD fee resolving to 0.379272391265 burned and 0.1896361956325 to each side. The same reads confirm the unit prices: 9,669,160 execution cost units billed 0.483458 XRD, which is the count multiplied by EXECUTION_COST_UNIT_PRICE_IN_XRD of 0.00000005 exactly.

The fee schedule is priced in dollars

The least-discussed constant in the model is USD_PRICE_IN_XRD. Radix does not price its fee schedule in XRD and let the dollar cost float; it prices several things in US dollars and converts at a hard-coded rate of 16.666666666666666666 XRD per USD – that is, 1 XRD = $0.06 (transaction_execution.rs).

Two of the engine's figures are set that way and carry the intended dollar amount in a source comment:

Storage – STATE_STORAGE_PRICE_IN_XRD and ARCHIVE_STORAGE_PRICE_IN_XRD are both 0.00009536743 XRD per byte, commented "1 MB = 6 USD".
The royalty ceiling – MAX_PER_FUNCTION_ROYALTY_IN_XRD is 166.666666666666666666 XRD, commented "10 USD", which is the same peg applied to the maximum a package or component owner may charge per call.

The consequence is easy to state and rarely stated: those dollar figures are only true at $0.06. The XRD amounts are what the protocol enforces, so the real cost of storing a megabyte, and the real ceiling on a royalty, move with the market price of XRD in the opposite direction from the comment. Changing the peg is a protocol update, not a parameter a validator or a fee market can adjust.

What the ledger actually shows

The fee burn is real and it is small. Read directly from the XRD resource at epoch 333342 (state version 547,628,486, 9 August 2026):

Total ever minted: 13,513,127,623.876558485383676466 XRD
Total ever burned: 7,666,505.2330698031699972 XRD
Current supply: 13,505,461,118.643488682213679266 XRD – the difference, exactly

Cumulative burn since the Babylon ledger began is 0.057% of everything ever minted. Measured against emissions of roughly 300 million XRD a year, the entire burn to date is worth about nine days of issuance. Radix is issuing far more than it destroys and will keep doing so until fee volume grows by orders of magnitude; a description of the model that leads with the burn describes an aspiration rather than the current ledger.

This is also what makes validator income a fee question rather than a subsidy question. The Foundation subsidy that once topped up validator revenue was voted out in February 2026 and scheduled to end in June 2026 (Validator Subsidy Sunset), leaving emissions and the 50% validator share of network fees as the whole of it, with the validator's own fee percentage deciding how much reaches delegators.

Issuance, fees and the cost of security

A proof-of-stake network has to pay its validators to take part in consensus, and the payment can come from new issuance, which dilutes every holder, or from transaction fees, which fall on users. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin set out the choice in 2016 in On Inflation, Transaction Fees and Cryptocurrency Monetary Policy. He judged that a fee-only model, the one Bitcoin moves toward as its block reward runs out, carries a high risk of paying too little for security with no way to raise it.

To decide how any extra revenue should be raised, he applied Ramsey pricing, the rule that a required revenue does least economic damage when it is taken a little from each source rather than a lot from one, and concluded that the best mix includes both higher fees and some inflation. Radix pays its validators from both sources: the emission schedule and the validators’ half of network fees.

The same essay compares three places a fee can go: to the validator that made the block, to all validators equally, or to the burn. In expectation redistributing and burning are equivalent, since burning 50 units a day while issuing 100 leaves validators and supply where redistributing 50 and issuing 50 would; what differs is which quantity becomes uncertain. Redistribution fixes the supply and lets validator income vary with usage. Burning fixes validator income and lets the supply vary, and it also reduces what validators could gain by pushing fees up through censorship or by restricting capacity. Buterin favoured an approach weighted toward burning, accepting an uncertain supply. The split described in Where a fee goes uses all three destinations at once.

No code caps $XRD at 24 billion

XRD is commonly described as having a fixed maximum supply of 24 billion. The ledger is more specific than that, and the distinction matters to anyone reasoning about the asset.

Read as a resource, XRD reports supply_fixed: false and mintable: true. There is no supply cap enforced at the resource level. What exists instead is an authority structure:

The minter and burner roles both require one system badge, the global caller badge of the Consensus Manager, which only that component can present, so no account, component or council can mint or burn $XRD. The engine bypasses both roles in two places: it destroys the burned half of each network fee when it settles a transaction, and the Babylon genesis transaction that minted the balances carried over from Olympia ran with authorization switched off (see $XRD Token).
The rules can never be changed: the updater of every mint, burn, freeze, recall, deposit and withdraw role is deny_all. The freezer and recaller roles are permanently deny_all, which is the ledger-level guarantee that XRD can never be frozen in a vault or clawed back from one.

So the 24 billion figure is the end of Radix's published emission schedule, ~12 billion over 40 years added to the ~12 billion created at Olympia genesis, and nothing in the protocol enforces it. The emission logic holds a rate, not a total: at the end of every epoch the Consensus Manager mints 2,853.88 $XRD, 300m a year at five-minute epochs, and no code counts what has been emitted or stops at 24 billion (mainnet genesis config). Ending emission there would take a protocol update that sets that amount to zero, the same class of change as moving the dollar peg: hard, public and out of any single party's hands. Without one, minting continues past 24 billion.

A vote to move that endpoint has not changed the rate. A May 2025 token holder consultation approved shortening the emission schedule by twenty years to end it at ~18 billion, with 91% of weighted input in favour; measured across the twelve months that followed, the network minted 297,171,771 XRD – the original ~300 million-a-year rate, unchanged. See Network Emissions.

Radix Economic Model
Measured at	Epoch 333342 · state version 547,628,486 (9 Aug 2026)
XRD supply	13,505,461,118.64
Total ever minted	13,513,127,623.88
Total ever burned	7,666,505.23 (0.057% of minted)
Emissions	~300M XRD/year, flat – see Network Emissions
Network fee split	50% burned · 25% proposer · 25% validator set
Tips	100% to the proposer, never burned
Royalties	100% to the recipient, outside the split
Fee schedule pegged at	1 XRD = 0.06 USD (protocol constant)
On-ledger supply cap	None – 24B is the end of Radix's published schedule, and no code enforces it