Last Friday, the Radix Foundation announced its 2026 Strategy, outlining a fundamental shift away from centralized execution toward a fully decentralized ecosystem.

That strategic shift also defines the conclusion of the Foundation-led Hyperscale research and this update explains what the completion of this interim phase will prioritize and how it will support the start of the next community-led phase.

The Interim Phase

Shortly after Dan’s passing, Timan, a long term and respected member of the community stepped up to undertake the role of Interim Hyperscale lead. His mandate was to stabilize the research and ensure the work continued. This role will formally end on February 4th.  

During his tenure, Timan, together with the private testing group and people in the community, successfully revived the Hyperscale testing and pushed it close to 400,000 TPS. That is further than it had ever been taken before, and it establishes something important: the underlying architecture was pioneered by Dan, but it is not reliant on him to continue. 

500k TPS

To conclude this phase, we intend to execute a public Hyperscale test by the end of January, targeting a throughput of at least 500,000 transactions per second.

In alignment with the Foundation’s strategy to conserve resources for the transition, this test will not be third-party validated. However, all efforts will be undertaken to ensure these parties can engage in future R&D and testing, should the community desire.

Instead, we are prioritizing reproducibility. This test is designed to provide the ecosystem with a transparent snapshot of current capabilities:

• The Network: Full configuration details.
• The Workload: Exact transaction composition.
• The Result: Raw, unvarnished performance data.

‍

The goal is not a marketing badge, but a technical baseline that any developer can verify, challenge, or extend either independently, or in collaboration with future community structures.

The Handover: Code & Documentation

“This interim phase was about getting Hyperscale to a point where it can stand on its own. It was to prove that the architecture Dan designed is robust, reproducible, and ready for the world. This push to a public test and documenting where we're at means the community has the tools to continue on the vision.” Timan, Interim Hyperscale Lead

The primary output of this phase is the code and documentation required for continued R&D. This push to a public test and documenting where we're at means the community have the tools to continue on the vision.

This ensures that progress on network scaling is no longer dependent on a Foundation mandate or a closed research team. We are packaging the test scripts, network configurations, and the experimental patches required to hit high-throughput targets.

The documentation will also address known constraints, including state injection challenges identified by the community. Rather than solving every edge case behind closed doors, we are moving the "work in progress" into the open, giving the community the best possible starting point to solve these challenges in a decentralized manner.

The Next Chapter

When this research sprint began following the loss of Dan Hughes, the ecosystem needed confirmation that the theoretical limits of Hyperscale could be realized. 

Working with private testing groups, Timan and others have pushed the network from a standstill to nearly 400,000 TPS. An incredible achievement given the unfortunate reasons for the transition.

While February 4th marks the end of the Foundation’s direct management of Hyperscale, but it is the beginning of the community’s ownership.

We are delivering the software, the tooling, and a known performance baseline. Whether the next step involves third-party validation, further optimization, or alternative implementations will be decided by the builders and node runners who now own the network's future.