At Radix, our strategic vision has always been to build a single decentralized network that can scale DeFi seamlessly to every single person on the planet (even though we didn’t initially know that DeFi was going to be called DeFi).
We started with a deep dive into the mechanics of Bitcoin in 2012, identifying that blockchains fundamentally couldn’t scale. The conclusions from that research then led to the beginnings of this project in 2013, and the realization that the heart of the problem - and the solution - was always going to be consensus. And so at Radix, our quest for consensus lies at the heart of our very own story.
Knowing this, between 2013-2019, we experimented with various consensus protocols and data architectures: including blocktrees, Directed Acyclic Graphs, Channelled Asynchronous State Trees, and Tempo. But none of them were good enough.
That’s why after seven years of R&D, we finally cracked it in 2020. The holy grail of consensus: Cerberus.
But Cerberus is technical. Very technical. Only a handful of people understand it. After all, why are “linear scalability” and “atomic composability” so important to DeFi? What is partial ordering? What is a view change? Why is parallelism so important to scalability? What’s a merged proposal vertex?
You have to be a hardcore consensus scientist to truly understand how Cerberus works.
No more.
Welcome to the Cerberus Infographic Series.
By joining us on this journey, you will understand how Cerberus works in detail. You will understand how Radix achieves infinite linear scalability while preserving atomic composability. You will understand why this is a game-changer for DeFi. And you will be in a small minority of people who understand how this technology is going to change everything.
Here’s the running order:
Chapter I: Introduction; Summary; Why Blockchains Can’t Scale
Chapter II: What is Radix?; The Shardspace and Validator Sets
Chapter III: Substate; Substate and Transactions
Chapter IV: Shard Allocation; Transactions
Chapter V: Nakamoto vs BFT-style Consensus; Consensus - Local Cerberus
Chapter VI: Consensus - Emergent Cerberus; Partial Ordering - Parallelization of Processing
Chapter VII: Maintaining a Record of Transactions; Sybil Resistance Through Proof of Stake; Conclusion
Chapter I: Introduction; Summary; Why Blockchains Can’t Scale
Download the PDFs or continue reading below!
- Episode 1: Introduction
- Episode 2: Summary
- Episode 3: Why Blockchains Can’t Scale
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If you’re feeling adventurous before the rest of the chapters, you can take a look at the Cerberus Whitepaper or independent academic validation of Cerberus for the technical details!
In the meantime, feel free to jump into the Radix Telegram channel or Discord to ask any questions, take a look at the Radix blog for the latest news and other topics, and sign-up for the Radix newsletter to get regular updates.