Radix [ /rædɪks/ ] (Abbreviation: $XRD; sign: √ ) is a full-stack, decentralized finance (DeFi) layer-1 (L1) protocol founded by Dan Hughes.
An associated cryptocurrency was launched in November 2020 as a price-vested ERC-20 token ($eXRD) on the Ethereum network. $eXRD was superseded by native $XRD in July 2021 with the launch of Radix’s Olympia Mainnet. A two-way, 1-1 exchange between $eXRD and $XRD exists on Bitfinex.
$XRD is the Radix network’s main unit of account, medium of exchange and store of value, as well as being used to incentivize network security and pay transaction fees.
Radix has been designed to address the requirements of DeFi, including fast consensus, decentralized applications, & atomic composability.
https://www.radixdlt.com/blog/runs-on-radix-when-radix-wins-you-win-too
[RadFi 2022: RDX Work](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iSK3rTjPMw)
RadFi 2022: RDX Work
Main article: History of Radix
Radix has adopted an incremental release strategy, building its platform from the ground up rather than copying existing approaches. This strategy allowed the team to test each level of functionality in a live environment while maintaining compatibility with future developments.
Since the Radix Production Network (RPN) naming convention was dropped, all releases are named after wonders of the ancient world, expanded beyond the traditional Seven Wonders to include Xi’an, a city in China where the Terracotta Army was found.
A test on a 2019 implementation called Tempo achieved over 1.4m tps on 1187 nodes.
From the Xi’an release, scheduled for 2024, Radix will use a fixed shard space of 2^256 shards, with responsibility over the shard space orchestrated by ‘shard groups’ of validators, allowing transaction throughput to scale linearly with the number of nodes.
Tests using Radix’s Cassandra cross-shard, atomically composable testnet and the Cerberus consensus mechanism have shown promise in being able to host and serve website data as well as ledger state:
“There’s a possibility that in some circumstances the actual content retrieval could maybe even outperform traditional centralized web servers because it’s automatically distributed; it’s load balanced.” - Dan Hughes, YouTube
Main article: Radix Mainnet (Olympia)
Olympia was the first Radix Mainnet. It was released on the 28th of July, 2021 and was the first implementation of the Radix Engine execution environment, the Cerberus consensus protocol (unsharded), and the native $XRD token.
Main article: Radix Developer Environment (Alexandria)
This was a major upgrade that occurred during December 2021 that provided preliminary tools for building blueprints and components using the Scrypto language.
Main article: Radix Mainnet (Babylon)
The Babylon release will debut blueprints and components / smart contracts, allowing true decentralized apps (’dApps’) on Radix. It is also expected to include staking changes and validator management improvements, among other updates.