Xi'an Protocol Upgrade

Overview

Xi'an is the fourth and final major milestone in the Radix roadmap, named after the ancient Chinese capital. It will implement the fully sharded form of the Cerberus consensus protocol, delivering infinite linear scalability and unlimited atomic composability to the Radix network.

Xi'an follows the progression from Olympia → Alexandria → Babylon → Xi'an, with each release adding fundamental capabilities. While Babylon (live since September 2023) introduced the full Radix stack (Scrypto, Radix Engine v2, Radix Wallet), Xi'an will unlock the network's ultimate scaling potential.

Key Capabilities

• Infinite linear scalability — adding more validator shards proportionally increases network throughput with no theoretical ceiling
• Unlimited atomic composability — cross-shard transactions maintain full atomicity, preserving DeFi composability at any scale
• Uncapped validator set — the current 100-validator cap is anticipated to be lifted, allowing unlimited validator participation
• Commodity hardware — validators can run on standard datacenter or even desktop hardware, as demonstrated by Hyperscale testing on AWS m6i.xlarge instances

Current Progress

Implementations of sharded Cerberus are being tested on the Cassandra test network. The Hyperscale public test in January 2026 demonstrated 500,000+ sustained TPS across 128 shards on commodity hardware, validating the core scaling thesis. A community-led Rust implementation (hyperscale-rs) is also underway.

No mainnet release date has been announced. The path to Xi'an depends on further Hyperscale R&D and community-driven development following the Foundation's 2026 transition strategy.

External Links

• Radix Roadmap — Knowledge Base
• Cerberus Whitepaper (arXiv)
• 2026 Strategy: The Next Chapter of Radix