What are RDX Labs and Cassandra? | The Radix Knowledge Base

RDX Labs, led by Dan Hughes, is the research and development arm of RDX Works. The purpose of RDX Labs is to research and test potential new directions for groundbreaking Radix technology well ahead of production-level implementation for a secure, reliable public network. RDX Labs utilizes cutting-edge technology that has been developed from 2013 through to the present day.

Cassandra is a project and test network being run within RDX Labs to research, test, and demonstrate various implementations of Cerberus, Radix’s peer-reviewed multi-shard consensus protocol. Fully sharded Cerberus is scheduled to go live in the Radix Xi’an Mainnet upgrae, and Cassandra is exploring some of the outer reaches of the form the implementation at Xi’an might take.

Cassandra is being undertaken in collaboration with the Radix Community, who run Cassandra nodes with Dan live on his Twitch channel, as well as the University of California Davis’ ExpoLab consensus experts.

You can read more about the output of this partnership in the peer-reviewed journal article Cerberus: Minimalistic Multi-shard Byzantine-resilient Transaction Processing (2023), the accompanying blog article Cerberus Consensus: Peer Reviewed, or the book Fault-Tolerant Distributed Transactions on Blockchain, February 2021, which features Cerberus as a novel consensus protocol.

Some of Cassandra’s achievements to date include:

Demonstrating the world’s first public cross-shard atomic transactions.
Demonstrating that different parts (images, videos) of static websites and even games can be hosted and distributed on different shards of Cassandra.
Demonstrating that large quantities of data can be imported on-ledger and replayed as atomic transactions on a sharded network.
Demonstrating hybrid probabilistic and deterministic consensus models.

Further Reading:

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