I keep seeing "is Radix dead" takes, so I went and actually checked the primary sources — Radix Blog, RadixTalk, , and the hyperscale-rs repo. Here's what's actually happening right now.
1. Hyperscale didn't stop after the Foundation left — it accelerated
In January the Foundation's own Hyperscale reference implementation sustained a public test of 500,000+ TPS (peaks above 700–800k) across 128 shards on commodity AWS hardware, with real cross-shard atomic swaps. That was the closing act of the Foundation-led phase, not the end of the story.
What happened after is the interesting part: the community picked it up and rebuilt it from scratch in Rust. hyperscale-rs, led by flightofthefox (proven.network), is now a 28-crate Cargo workspace with 2,000+ commits that throws out the original Hyperscale/Cerberus design entirely in favor of a HotStuff-2–derived per-shard consensus plus a leaderless "beacon chain" control plane. In April 2026 it got a formal RFC for delivering the Xi'an mainnet upgrade (18-month roadmap, $300k budget approved by community consultation, testnet targeted Q3/Q4 2027 / mainnet Q1 2028). Milestone 1 — dynamic topology, validator shuffling, live shard splitting/merging, virtual nodes — is basically feature-complete as of this month. The lead dev calls it "far and away the most sophisticated sharded L1 design ever implemented," and given the beacon-chain + verkle-proof + two-phase-commit architecture, that's not just hype.
The Hyperscale Weekly series on has been shipping every single week for 9 straight weeks — this week's edition covers a Quint formal-verification model that mathematically proves the shard-reshape lifecycle (splits, merges, staffing) is safe.
Worth noting for the history: Timan, a long-time community member, stepped up as Interim Hyperscale Lead after Dan Hughes's passing and personally drove the testing that got Hyperscale to ~400-500k TPS before handing the baton to the community-led effort in February.
2. Governance is genuinely decentralizing, not just talking about it
The current Radix Accountability Council (RAC) — 5 members elected by 1.34B XRD / 1,151 accounts — is deep into standing up a Marshall Islands DAO LLC (MIDAO) to receive the Foundation's treasury, IP, and operations. As of July 2026 both the Operating Agreement and the Charter are finished and sitting with the Foundation's lawyers for review before going to a full community vote. Stokenet (the testnet) has already fully transitioned to community-run validators and Gateway. This "Transition RAC" has weathered two membership changes (Tadkis replacing Faraz, Alfred replacing Peachy) and kept functioning the whole time — which is honestly a healthier sign than if nobody had ever left.
And the next chapter is already starting: self-nominations for the permanent RAC opened this week. Most notably, Timan (aka djtebel, founder of Astrolescent and Defiplaza, and the guy who steered Hyperscale through its interim phase) put himself forward on July 15th, explicitly framing it as stepping up again "when the community needed it most." His nomination also calls for recruiting complementary skillsets — biz dev, fundraising, marketing, governance/compliance — rather than a one-person show. Other community members (Leonardo of BONDIX, linuxx) have self-nominated too. Three separate governance cycles (Transition RAC → DAO paperwork → permanent RAC election) running in under 6 months is not what a coasting project looks like.
3. The tooling layer is filling in fast — including a new Rust SDK
For years, basic off-ledger tooling (ROLA login, transaction building/signing, key management) mostly existed in JavaScript. This week, community dev genkipool shipped a native radixdlt-rust-sdk, dual-licensed MIT/Apache-2.0, that brings all of that into Rust — plus a built-in MCP server so AI agents can talk to a Radix wallet directly. Early days (few commits, one star) but exactly the kind of infrastructure a maturing ecosystem needs, and it's already been picked up in the wiki's weekly roundup.
Alongside it, Hookah (webhook/event-trigger infra for dApps to react to on-ledger events) just went fully open-source and self-hostable under MIT.
4. The community site itself keeps growing
has turned into a genuinely useful community hub — architecture explainers, a dedicated Hyperscale breakdown page, a dashboard for validators/staking. The Developer Console in particular is worth a look on its own: it lets you deploy packages straight to Mainnet or Stokenet, send raw transaction manifests, create and configure fungible/non-fungible tokens, and manage on-ledger metadata — all from the browser, wallet-connected, without touching the CLI first. That's exactly the kind of grassroots infrastructure you'd expect from an ecosystem that's alive, not one coasting on inertia.
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