Dev WG · Deliver the Dry-Run Protocol Upgrade & MetaMask Snap

Two development workstreams the DAO could fund early: a rehearsal of a mainnet protocol upgrade, and a MetaMask Snap that would let Radix reach people through the wallet they already run. Both began as forum threads in January 2026. Neither has been formalised, and between them they run to seven posts.

The dry-run protocol upgrade

talesofbeem opened the dry-run thread on 25 January 2026 with the problem underneath it: most of the developers who built the protocol have moved on, and anyone who wants to change the Radix Engine needs to know they can test that change against a running network first. The proposal is to complete a protocol upgrade end to end, relearning the stack in the process, on an upgrade whose payload does not matter.

projectShift gave the rehearsal its shape in the same thread. Change the protocol's moniker and nothing else, then plant two faults on purpose: a comment marking where the bug is, and something that halts the network. The exercise then tests debugging, rollback and redeployment rather than the happy path alone. talesofbeem agreed to fold monitoring and a halted network into the write-up. The thread has stood at three posts since that day.

The MetaMask Snap

The Snap thread opened three days earlier, on 22 January 2026, and its argument is about where effort goes. Maintaining one exclusive Radix wallet spends the Foundation's resources against a field of more than 130 web3 wallets, while Sui, Cosmos, Starknet and Near reach MetaMask users through snaps instead. Jon-Eric Cook proposed hardware-wallet support as the step after, and the author agreed it could be the next integration.

The author was explicit that the thread is not a proposal: he opened it for comment and left formalising it through on-chain governance to any developer who wanted to take it up. Nobody has. MetaMask's allowlist registry carried 186 verified snaps when this page was checked on 28 August 2026 and none of them is Radix's, so what this card needs is a package and a champion rather than a decision.

Deliverables

• Fund and run one protocol upgrade end to end, moniker only, with a deliberate liveness break to exercise debugging and rollback.
• Write up the result as the process the next real upgrade follows.
• Build, publish and maintain a Radix MetaMask Snap, and take it through the allowlist.

Dependencies & cross-references

• Governed by Daffy's Radix DAO framework (repo Shadaffy/radix-dao); see the Governance Framework Reference Repo and Charter (Round 1).
• The rehearsal is for the Xi'an protocol upgrade, which is the next real one; the Snap sits alongside stewardship of the Radix Wallet.

Sources

• RFC: Dry Run Protocol Upgrade (25 January 2026, three posts)
• RFC: Metamask Snap Integration (22 January 2026, four posts)
• MetaMask Snaps allowlist registry