What are the Radix Public Network and Radix Ledger?

Radix Public Network

The Radix Public Network is the live set of computers (nodes) that run the Radix Node software and connect with one another via the internet. They send messages amongst themselves in accordance with the Radix Protocol to sync the state of the Radix Ledger.

A subset of these nodes have registered with the network to be a validator node. The top 100 of these validator nodes by amount of XRD staked join the validator set and participate in consensus. By participating in consensus, validator nodes are responsible for validating transactions, and are thus the backbone that secures the Radix Network. It is therefore vitally important that XRD token holders delegate stake to validator nodes wisely to secure the network.

You can see the list of validator nodes on the Radix Dashboard.

When you use Radix Wallet, it’s connecting to the Radix Public Network, either to submit transactions or retrieve information about balances, accounts, transactions, and more.

Radix Ledger

The Radix Ledger is the ledger that serves as a record of transactions on the Radix Public Network.

The Radix Ledger records the ownership of all XRD and other tokens created on the network. This includes blueprints, the state of components, user-created assets, NFTs, or even data as esoteric as the average temperature on a specific day, for example, in an agricultural derivatives decentralized application.

By agreeing with one another on every change to the Radix Ledger, validator nodes, in consensus, can agree on the state of the Radix Ledger. This is what allows Radix to be decentralized, permissionless, and trustless.

Changes to the Radix Ledger are created through transactions, which in turn contain a set of low-level updates to state called substate.

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