How Radius Works
How our technology is building the future
Radius envisions a future where data and value interact seamlessly at massive scale, empowering new revenue and payment models, and even entire new industries. Over time, the internet has demonstrated the transformative power of low-cost, instant communications and has been built to handle this activity at immense scale. Today, users are increasingly demanding that their financial experience mirror their usual low-cost, instant internet experience. To support this future, transformative technology must deliver a similar experience for money and do so at a massive scale.
While conventional blockchains have demonstrated the potential of smart contracts, cryptography, and stablecoins to revolutionize the way we transfer value, they aren’t ready to handle the scale, speed, and low-cost needs of this onchain future.
Radius is building industrial-grade smart contract infrastructure for the onchain economy.
The Radius Difference
Industrial-grade scale: Some of the most performant conventional blockchains and layer-2 platforms can handle up to tens of thousands of transactions per second. While this is a significant improvement over the early blockchains, it falls short of the needs of a massively onchain future. In a world of mass smart contract adoption, infrastructure must be able to support millions or even tens of millions of transactions per second.
In conventional blockchains, all transactions are processed as a linear chain of blocks. Every transaction included in a block must be processed by all nodes in the network which means this process cannot be parallelized. In other words, only one block is produced at a time, and adding more nodes doesn’t increase throughput.
Radius offers an innovative alternative. Instead of all transactions being handled in a linear chain of sequential blocks, Radius has a fleet of transaction processors, called agents, which can execute non-conflicting transactions in parallel. By adding additional hardware resources, Radius can run additional agents to increase throughput and achieve horizontal scalability. Thanks to this design, Radius has demonstrated throughput of over two million transactions per second in benchmark testing.
Real-time settlement: The rise of the internet has demonstrated the value of real-time data transfers. But while data moves instantly, financial transactions often involve multi-day settlement, leading to higher costs and poor experiences for customers. Blockchains move value and process transactions 24/7, providing significant efficiency and availability benefits, but users often need to wait seconds or even minutes until their transaction is completed.
Conventional blockchains update data in a discrete sequence of blocks. When a user initiates a transaction, it remains pending until the next block is created, at which point the transaction may be included and processed. At this point, the system determines if there are any conflicting transactions and places them into a particular order.
However, when Radius receives a transaction, all data which will be affected by the transaction is immediately locked and execution begins without waiting for a particular block time. In the event of conflicting transactions, the transactions will be executed sequentially. This allows for real-time, atomic data updates which, depending on transaction complexity, can occur in less than one second.
Near-zero transaction costs: Lowering costs drives adoption and activity. In the early era of text messaging, users paid as much as $0.10 per text and carefully managed their allocation of messages, but as messaging became free we can now send numerous instant messages a day without even thinking about costs.
Our current financial infrastructure and payment solutions often extract high fees which price certain activities and payments, such as micropayments, out of the market. While blockchain transaction costs have significantly improved in recent years, even fees on the order of a few cents are too expensive to support the emergence of innovative, smart contract-based business models.
In contrast to conventional blockchains which require that each node in the network processes all transactions and holds full system data, Radius divides workload between a network’s fleet of agents and data partitions which reduces redundancy and lowers costs. In benchmarking, Radius can process simple payments for as low as 1/100,000th of a penny per transaction while offering linear scalability. Radius’ robust scalability means that the platform does not need to use transaction fees or transaction auctions as a rate limiting mechanism.
Flexibility: Currently, on and offchain data do not effectively interoperate. While solutions such as asset tokenization aim to bridge this gap, atomic settlement across assets on new and legacy databases remains a challenge. Conventional blockchains require that each node stores a full copy of the blockchain locally and executes transactions against its own local data storage. However, much of our world’s data lives offchain.
Radius allows smart contracts to interact with both onchain and offchain data, providing a much needed interface between onchain and offchain worlds. This unique capability offers significant opportunity for innovation, especially for Web2 applications and companies which hold much of their data offchain.
The Radius team has hands-on experience using and building both traditional and blockchain-based infrastructure. We have felt the frustration of trying to work around infrastructure limitations, and believe in building a better future. We want to build financial infrastructure which can take smart contracts into the mainstream at industrial-scale, and this vision is built directly into our technical infrastructure.
Radius is building a future where money can move like data — extremely quickly, seamlessly, at low-cost, and at massive scale. If you want to join us on this journey, we want to hear from you.