Daniel Patrick Hughes (24 July, 1979 - 27 July, 2025), also known by his forum pseudonym ‘fuserleer’, was a British software engineer, veteran of the gaming industry, founder of Radix and Founder / Director of RDX Works.
https://youtu.be/MaPkxM9MS_0?si=lcYzra3KjxmhXSEu
“I’m proud to be from Stoke-on-Trent, my roots are here and it provides a peaceful and calm environment to focus in on developing the technology and coding that will ensure DLT is scalable and sustainable.” - Link
Dan Hughes grew up in Stoke-on-Trent in the UK. His childhood in the former mining town was marked by ”weekends in working men's clubs, where card-carrying union men would play darts and bingo with lashings of lager”, while most other boys his age were playing soccer.
Hughes' path toward technology began early when his dad, a bus driver, brought home a ZX81 computer when Hughes was about five years old. This introduction to computing would prove foundational, as Hughes found an instant attraction to computer programming that set him apart from his peers. He later recalled that "no one throughout my entire school life was interested in coding", highlighting his unique passion for the field from an early age.
This early exposure to computing and programming laid the tracks for Hughes to eventually become a successful mobile developer, setting the stage for his later pioneering work in distributed ledger technology.
Hughes in 2019.
Hughes opted not to go to university and instead worked for several software, gaming and mobile development companies after finishing school.
In the early 2000s, Hughes pivoted to freelance work, focusing on mobile SKUs. A couple of years later, he started his own company, KDB Technology, which specialized in Near Field Communication (NFC) technology and contactless payment services. Under Hughes's leadership, KDB Technology provided services for major mobile OEMs and operators such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, T-Mobile, and Samsung.
Before founding Radix, Hughes established himself in the mobile technology sector, where he previously helped build the software behind NFC mobile payments. His early career provided him with both technical expertise and financial resources that would later prove crucial during his years of independent research and development.
Hughes' journey into distributed ledger technology began when he first heard about Bitcoin in 2011 and a year later finally got around to downloading the 15-page document that became known to blockchain followers as the Satoshi White Paper. After studying Nakamoto's architecture, Hughes played around with the code, trying to modify its architecture in a process known as forking. He quickly identified fundamental scalability issues, realizing that the more people used bitcoin for transactions, the slower the system would become.
Determined to solve these problems, Hughes decided to build his own version of Nakamoto's formula. In 2012, he moved out of his small home office and took over the dining room of his house, removing the dining table and replacing it with stacks of servers, filing cabinets, white boards, six screens and a mass of cables, much to the anguish of his wife.
The following six years were marked by intense dedication and personal sacrifice. Hughes worked in his dining room every day, waking up to write code virtually nonstop until around 4 a.m. the next morning. He lived off his savings and some investment returns he'd made from some bets in mobile technology. The work was so consuming that Hughes experienced moments of severe depression, where he thought blockchain's scaling problem was insurmountable.
The perfectionist nature of Hughes' approach meant that he threw away months of work at least twice during this six-year period. One particularly difficult moment came after 18 months of work on one iteration, when he realized he needed to start from scratch again. The financial pressure eventually became so intense that Hughes and his wife sold their four-bedroom house and downsized to a smaller, two-bedroom home.
In early 2017, Hughes achieved a breakthrough with what would become the fourth iteration of what he had started working on in 2012, containing only about 10% of any of the code he wrote over the last six years. That year, he moved into a new office and it took about half a year to readjust from regular night-owling.
Hughes' work began attracting significant attention and investment. He got into Y Combinator, a prestigious Silicon Valley program for startup founders, in 2017, though he dismisses that part of his story as a fluke. More importantly, he attracted $1 million in investment from a leading European venture capitalist, specifically from Saul Klein, who runs London venture capital firm LocalGlobe. Klein compared his experience meeting Hughes to when he met the guys in Estonia when they developed Skype.
By 2019, Hughes had assembled an international team, with eight engineers who had recently flown in to Stoke from Argentina, Australia and elsewhere to work with him, along with ten more staff in London. The project had also gained significant community following, with more than 19,000 people following his work on the messaging app Telegram.
In October 2024, Hughes announced a major organizational restructuring. He stepped away from RDX Works to focus solely on the Radix Foundation and Radix Labs, a new subsidiary focused on research into Cerberus & Xi'an. This change was part of addressing the conflict of interest between RDX Works and the Radix Foundation, allowing each entity to focus on distinct objectives.
The organizational changes continued in February 2025, when Hughes announced the decision to end ongoing development work with RDX Works and move development in-house at the Radix Foundation. This restructuring was designed to provide a leaner, more efficient approach and allow for complete control over the development path of features.