History of Radix

Radix has been developed through 6 major iterations since its inception in 2013, beginning with a blockchain model and culminating with a fixed shard space and Cerberus.

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Timeline

KEY DATES	EVENT
1979-07	https://radixdlt.notion.site/Dan-Hughes-ce73c8c28e8446b5b4e8d997f8be3d98 was born in Stoke-on-Trent, England.
1984	https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2019/01/09/this-hermitic-engineer-is-plotting-the-death-of-blockchain/, which sparked his interest in coding.
2008-02-25	Hughes incorporated https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/06512975, a mobile technology company.
2011	Hughes https://web.archive.org/web/20171211210150/https://www.radix.global/about.
2013	Hughes forked the Bitcoin code to achieve a maximum of 1000 transactions per second (tps).
2013-2016	Hughes developed https://radixdlt.notion.site/eMunie-6ce15e33de9e4708b2da4a6e20b6ddc7
2016-12-02	Hughes and Piers Ridyard incorporated https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/10508397, decentralised deal-room software for insurance companies.
2017-07-13	https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/10864928incorporated.
2019-06-11	https://radixdlt.notion.site/Tempo-Consensus-Mechanism-cc66e55fbb6f46a990ff7b9088318f39 https://www.radixdlt.com/blog/replaying-bitcoin.
2019-07-16	https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/12106715 incorporated.
2021-07-28	Radix ‘https://radixdlt.notion.site/8fa2123a247c4e60853253ca2ab3e40e’ Mainnet launched.
2021-12-15	Radix ‘https://radixdlt.notion.site/ab78b3f478594b4d8905360c2fade517’ developer environment launched.
2023-09-28	Radix ‘https://radixdlt.notion.site/2cdc168d56e04787a9f412c23560c4b0’ Mainnet launched.

The Radix backstory by RADX.

Development History

From 2013, Dan Hughes began to experiment with various data structures and consensus mechanisms. Each iteration led to insights that have informed the current Radix architecture.

Radix Iteration 1: Blockchain (700-1000 tps)

In 2013, Hughes forked the Bitcoin codebase and experimented with different permutations of block size, block times, and hardware. These experiments established that the practical limit of blockchain throughput is approximately 700-1000 tps. A simple comparison with Visa at 24,000 tps meant that blockchains would never work as a global payments rail.

Further Reading

Why Blockchains Don’t Scale

eMunie

Main Article: eMunie

eMunie was Hughes’ attempt to create a blockchain platform that would crack the trilemma of security, scalability, and speed. Although it consistently achieved 400 transactions per second and contained built-in mailing systems, chat rooms, and a proprietary marketplace, Hughes realized it still fell short.

Radix Iteration 2: Blocktree (200 tps)

The limits of monolithic blockchains led to Hughes’ first experiments with sharding in the form of a ‘blocktree’: a data structure of multiple, branching blockchains. At this stage, every branch had its own trust boundary, necessitating a complex messaging system to communicate between them. This led to the insight of grouping related transactions together into the same branch. Unfortunately, at around 200tps, any disagreements between branches led to an exponential rise in message complexity as the states reorganized.

Radix Iteration 3: Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) (1500 tps)

Following on from projects like IOTA, Hughes started exploring Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), which allow for parallel, asynchronous processing of transactions. This was also a move away from Proof-of-work (PoW) sybil protection. Ultimately, the lack of coordination between nodes made the DAG vulnerable to double-spend attacks.