DeXter (formerly ProjectX) was a community-built, decentralized order-book exchange on the Radix network – the first order-book DEX on Radix built entirely by volunteers from the community. It offered a centralized-exchange-style trading experience with market and limit orders, live price charts, an on-chain order book, and historical trade data, all settled on Radix mainnet, and its front-end was open source. Contributors proposed formally retiring the project in February 2026 and confirmed the wind-down on 8 March 2026; the exchange front-end is no longer online.
History
DeXter grew out of a Medium post by Fred Liebenberg – founder of AlphaDEX – which asked whether the Radix community could collectively build a full-featured exchange app in the spirit of Web3. The post drew in contributors from across the ecosystem, including Faraz Abulhawa, founder of Radstakes, who joined alongside developers, designers, testers, and community managers. The project shipped its first order-book functionality around the Babylon mainnet upgrade in September 2023 and ran as a live exchange until the community retired it in early 2026.
Trading
DeXter provided a decentralized trading experience modelled on centralized exchanges: market and limit orders, live price graphs, order-book depth, user order history, and downloadable historical trade reports. Radix's asset-oriented model let the order book and settlement run natively on-ledger. The Radix Foundation published a walkthrough of the exchange for new users.
The interface itself is gone: as of 28 July 2026 dexteronradix.com resolves to a parked-domain lander rather than the exchange, and the project's GitBook documentation returns a 404, so the front-end survives only in archived snapshots. The underlying AlphaDEX matching engine that DeXter traded against remains live on-ledger.
DEXTR Token & Governance
DEXTR was DeXter's contributor and governance token: trading fees collected by the exchange were distributed to holders to reward their contributions. Roughly 100,000 DEXTR were minted biweekly against a planned maximum supply of 14.5 million, with emissions set to decrease linearly until they ended in 2032. Allocation was community-driven: contributors were nominated for each distribution period, and the final split was set by the share of allocation points assigned to each nominee.
Emissions stopped six years early. The validator staking-rewards programme was halted with the February 2026 retirement proposal, and the token has been static since: the 8 March 2026 buy-back order was sized at 4,739,465.1 DEXTR – the entire supply at that date – and an on-ledger read of the resource on 28 July 2026 returns the same 4,739,465.13 total supply (resource_rdx1t…9pcj0c), roughly a third of the planned cap. No burn has been executed against it.
Retirement (2026)
On 18 February 2026 a project lead opened a public discussion in the DeXter Telegram proposing that the project be formally retired, citing the lack of activity on the exchange, the tapering of the validator emission subsidy, and uncertainty around the Radix Foundation's move to maintenance mode. The proposal had four parts: cease the validator staking-rewards programme immediately, auction off the validator owner badge, spend the treasury's XRD reserves buying back all circulating DEXTR, and burn whatever DEXTR remained in the treasury.
The community backed it. On 8 March 2026 the team confirmed that all DeXter assets had been converted to XRD and a limit order placed to buy back the circulating supply. That order is verifiable on-ledger: transaction txid_rdx1ppaz0…7vaydx withdrew 1,210,222.41 XRD from the DeXter treasury account and placed a limit buy for 4,739,465.1 DEXTR at 0.25535 XRD each on the AlphaDEX order book. A read of that account on 28 July 2026 shows 1,213,497.76 DEXTR – about a quarter of the supply – repurchased so far, with the balance of the XRD still resting in the open order.
The validator was kept running rather than sold: its operator lowered the fee from 100% to 10% so existing delegators continue to earn XRD rewards, with no further DEXTR incentives. Development had already stopped – the last commit to the DeXter-on-Radix GitHub organisation landed in March 2025.
Community & Impact
DeXter was run as an open community project, welcoming UI/UX designers, front-end and full-stack developers, project managers, and marketers as contributors. Decision-making – including token distribution and, in the end, the decision to wind down – was made in public in the project's Telegram channel, which makes DeXter one of the clearest examples on Radix of an application both built and owned by its community, and one of the few to close down on the same terms.