Overview
Radix Labs is the research and development division of the Radix Foundation, and the successor development entity to RDX Works, continuing core protocol development for the Radix network. Its stated mission is to deliver the Xi'an protocol upgrade — the fully sharded mainnet that brings linear scalability to production without sacrificing atomic composability.
Xi'an's consensus design is the fully sharded Cerberus protocol, building on the earlier Cassandra research prototype. In parallel, the community-led hyperscale-rs initiative has emerged as the leading production candidate, diverging from Cerberus toward a HotStuff-2–derived per-shard consensus. Radix Labs coordinates with the Radix Accountability Council on protocol governance.
Roadmap
According to the official Radix Labs roadmap, the Xi'an track targets an Alpha release in early 2027, a Beta later in 2027, and a full launch in the second half of 2027. A large part of the work is reimplementing the protocol entirely in Rust, moving away from the Java-based hybrid stack of Babylon, and hardening the consensus mechanism into a production network candidate.
The current live network is Babylon (2023–present), which delivered smart contracts and dApps via Scrypto. Xi'an is the next major milestone on the path to Hyperscale-grade linear scalability.