Radix Protocol Releases

Radix names its major network releases after cities of the ancient world, and each added a layer the last had done without: Olympia opened the public ledger in July 2021 with staking and the native XRD token and no smart contracts at all; Alexandria gave developers a Scrypto environment in December 2021, for an engine mainnet could not yet run; Babylon brought that engine live on 28 September 2023; and Xi’an is where sharding, the half of the design every release so far has deferred, has to arrive.

How a release lands

A release changes the rules every node runs, so it cannot be adopted piecemeal: operators upgrade, the validator set signals readiness, and the network crosses over at a nominated epoch. Smaller protocol updates land two to three times a year, and Radix’s documentation notes that these are what other networks call hard forks. Stokenet, the public test network, carries the same protocol version as mainnet and is periodically reset, which destroys every balance and deployed package on it.