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.

Sources:

Hello, some users ask why we do not lower the fees to 0%. The reasons for Genkipool are as follows:

• We believe that it is not beneficial for the project to create a network with a downward trend.

• We do not like to use a bait to attract users and once they are in, raise the fee.

• We do not like to treat the user from the outside better than the one who is already inside.

• We are not to compete with other validators, we are to promote a functional, secure and stable network.

• We don't like to use aggressive marketing strategies.

• Selling below cost is considered unfair competition.

• We like to give value and have our work recognized.

• For us this is like asking, Why not do a token burn? Burning tokens temporarily raises the price without adding value to the network.

Thank you for supporting and trusting Genkipool, remember to delegate to at least 5 validators.

Crypto Dragon ball battle

This post is made to make you reflect and create awareness of the possible path towards which we are going if we continue to act like this, if you have other points of view, leave your opinion, I will be happy to read you.

Reflections SPO:

If you tell a large SPO that raising several pools damages the project, they will respond to you, it is the friendly free market, but then you will see them telling small SPOs that putting a margin of 0% damages the project.

In my opinion both strategies harm the Cardano project.

The big SPOs now laugh and dance watching how they make more and more money creating more pools, but they only show us what can happen if we continue to act like this.

What will happen when the big players arrive with their 100 private pools and the rest of the public pools and can give better benefits than the pools of a normal SPO?

Both the big SPOs and the small SPOs will only have served as guinea pigs to test the system and present a report of results to those big players.

Crises occur when they are in the middle of a technological revolution and the rich earn money by lending money, in the future blockchain there will be contracts, credits, loans …, the big players will see that at the base of the pyramid there are many small amounts of money that if everything is put together is a large amount of money and they will try to raise it to the top of the pyramid with very abusive credit policies and very deceptive practices, credits will be available to anyone, this is known as the golden age and It is where the business cycle begins.

At the beginning of the cycle, people can ask for loans and pay them back with what they earn, then little by little the debt increases and the big players tell them they don’t need to pay off capital, they can pay only interest, in the end they can’t pay either the interests so they ask for another loan to be able to pay it and this is how debt is created and over time the debt becomes impossible to pay and the big players stop lending money and the whole system falls.

Large SPOs complain that small SPOs for putting a margin at 0% because that prevents them from putting a margin of 10% or more, if delegates bet on this type of operators in the end the small SPOs will cease to exist and a centralized network will be left with very little offer, you will have to accept what they impose on you.

Now we have the opportunity to prevent history from repeating itself, we can avoid relinquishing control of our money to those big players, it could be prevented if Cardano will limit the number of pools, but we cannot depend on the actions of a third party, we must be able to make our own decisions and know how to choose the best one for us. If you do not want to fall into the same trap as always this time avoid greed and do not be fooled by incredible illusory offers with which to earn quick money in the short term, because in the long term you will end up paying them.

If you are a great SPO and you still think about continuing to create more pools to earn quick and easy money, great, enjoy your bubble until those great players arrive.

If you are a delegator, avoid delegating to greedy operators who raise several pools or at least avoid delegating to the pools of the big players when they arrive.

To finish I would like to thank Rodrigo for his attention and help, the title of this post is his idea.