Radium XT Release Notes
Radium Extended or Radium XT is the latest codebase upgrade and client version of the Radium blockchain. It’s an upgrade from PoSv3 to bitcoin 0.13 codebase.
Main Features
100% Backward Compatibility
Backward compatible (or sometimes backward-compatible or backwards compatible) refers to a hardware or software system that can successfully use interfaces and data from earlier versions of the system or with other systems. This is especially important for exchanges and other service providers as they don’t need to upgrade to Radium XT if they don’t want to.
Atomic Swaps
An atomic swap is a smart contract technology that enables the exchange of one cryptocurrency for another without using centralized intermediaries. We wanted this technology to be added to the Radium technology suite so RADS can be listed on decentralized exchanges that use atomic swaps technology.
Decreased Syncing Times
Syncing the blockchain on the old client takes a long time; it can take a few days or even longer in certain circumstances. We really wanted to decrease syncing times and we did. The new client takes about 60–90 minutes on a system with an SSD and a few hours longer on an HDD. It’s a massive improvement that users will most certainly appreciate.
Fewer Orphan Blocks Visible
Orphan blocks are blocks that are not accepted into the blockchain network due to a time lag in the acceptance of the block in question into the blockchain. The new client no longer clogs up the transaction page with orphan blocks.
Option to Activate SegWit
SegWit is the process by which the block size limit on a blockchain is increased by removing signature data from transactions. When certain parts of a transaction are removed, this frees up space or capacity to add more transactions to the chain. Although SegWit is not activated yet at this point, the option is available now.
Basic Reskin
For the time being we are using a basic reskin of the standard qt-wallet design. A lot of time and work goes into a complete overhaul of the wallet design and as resources are limited, it is on our to-do list.
HD Wallet Generation
An HD Wallet, or Hierarchical Deterministic wallet, is a new-age digital wallet that automatically generates a hierarchical tree-like structure of private/public addresses (or keys), thereby addressing the problem of the user having to generate them on their own.
Significant Decrease in CPU Usage
We take pride in building a client that’s very energy efficient and doesn’t put much strain on hardware. We were able to decrease CPU usage significantly. The new client can run on older systems as well.
Increased Stability when Staking a Large Number of Coins
Creating a stable and secure product remains our priority, resulting in a stable staking experience.
4k Scaling
The old client didn’t scale very well on 4k displays. The UI of the new client does scale on such higher resolution monitors.
What’s not in there yet but what we want to add in the future…
Advanced Staking Reward Tracker
The design and where we want it in the client is completely done, but it takes more time and work to implement it.
Full Reskin
We would really like a proper reskin of the new client, but once again this takes more time and resources to finish and we didn’t want to postpone the release of the new client any longer at this point as people have been waiting in anticipation for this release.
