Vero Is Coming Back — Jack Levin Says the Oracle Has to Be Rebuilt First

At 3:06 AM on Aug 22, 2026, in the Jack's Office topic of X1 World, Jack Levin — posting as Cyphereus Prime — answered the question the X1 community has been asking since April: what happened to Vero?

“Main infra issue is Oracle security.”
“But bridge came first which had to be made even more secure with more features.”
“So we will get Oracle done properly then launch Vero again.”

Three lines, and a roadmap. Vero — X1's on-chain prediction market, where traders bet on whether Bitcoin closes a cycle higher or lower — is not dead. It is queued behind an oracle rebuild, which was itself queued behind the bridge. And the on-chain record makes it clear why the oracle is the thing standing in the way.

Vero was one of the most-used protocols X1 has ever had

It is easy to forget how much traffic Vero moved, because the front end has been quiet for months. The chain has not forgotten. Pulling the program catalogue from X1 Agents Radio and cross-checking each program against rpc.mainnet.x1.xyz, four related contracts account for 308,745 all-time transactions:

For scale: that puts Vero's main trading program ahead of every X1 protocol except the core oracle, token, and DEX infrastructure. Only XDEX and the chain's system-level programs sit above it.

The last trade settled at 00:36:15 UTC on Apr 9, 2026, slot 41,943,697. That is when the market went quiet. The staking pool did not: its most recent transaction landed on Aug 18, 2026, four days before Jack's message. Stakers are still in there, still touching the contract.

The oracle is the bottleneck, and the data shows it

Look at the fourth row again. The Oracle Vault program lived for about 31 hours — from 01:38 UTC on Mar 26 to 08:34 UTC on Mar 27 — and burned through 27,831 transactions in that window. Roughly fifteen price submissions a minute, non-stop, for a day and a bit.

Its instruction set is four calls: initialize, set_oracle_key, submit_price, batch_submit_prices_oracle. Its error strings include “Caller is not the admin.” That is a single-key price feed. One authority signs the prices, and every settlement on the platform inherits whatever that key says Bitcoin was worth.

For a prediction market this is the whole ball game. Vero's contract does not care about opinion — it compares a settlement price to a snapshot price and pays the winning side. Compromise the key that writes those two numbers and you do not need to beat the market, you just write the outcome. Jack's phrase — “main infra issue is Oracle security” — is precisely this problem, stated plainly.

X1 has already solved an adjacent version of it. The X1 Randomness Protocol is secured by eight validators and three community audits rather than one signer. A price oracle built to the same standard is a bigger job than a randomness beacon — it needs liveness at 15-minute granularity, not just unpredictability — but it is the shape of the fix.

What Vero actually is

In Jack's own words, from his long-form post on X: the goal was “a prediction market that felt like a trading terminal. Real-time prices, immediate feedback, the ability to enter and exit positions just like you would on any exchange.” He describes it as a demo Dapp built to let users explore X1 — one that grew into “a million lines of code and live trading on X1.”

The mechanic is binary. You pick UP or DOWN on BTC over a cycle and buy shares at the current market price. Pricing follows an LMSR AMM curve, so size moves the price and early conviction gets the better fill. Cycles run at 15 minutes, 1 hour, 6 hours, 24 hours, 1 week and 30 days. The 15-minute market was always the busy one.

Settlement is automated and, importantly, not privileged: a bot calls it, but Jack notes “anyone could call it as the system is completely decentralized.” When the cycle ends the contract compares settlement price to the cycle-start snapshot and pays out immediately. No dispute window, no manual step.

On top of that sits a full trade explorer, a leaderboard sortable by total P&L, weekly P&L, trade count or points, and a 7-day championship that resets weekly with medals for the top three. Points accrue at one per share traded and twenty per XNT won. Jack's numbers at the time of writing: 20,000+ trades from 100+ unique traders, 150,000 XNT in volume, and a top trader up over 1,356 XNT.

Staking: traders pay, stakers get paid

The half of Vero that never stopped is the staking pool, and it is the cleanest part of the design. You deposit XNT, receive shares, and every 15 minutes a crank distributes 50% of newly accumulated trading fees across the pool in proportion to shares. The staking page still states the terms today: 5% deposit fee (paid into the bonus vault), no cooldown and instant unstake, 1 XNT minimum.

Jack's launch post for Vero Staking framed the pitch bluntly: “Half of all trading fees go to stakers. That's the entire model.” He quoted roughly 135% APR at the time and was careful to caveat it — “This comes from real trading activity, not token emissions or inflation… Your yield depends entirely on trading volume. Nothing is guaranteed.”

Then the Foundation put its own money behind it. Under Staker Boost, as Jack described it: “traders pay 0.25% in fees which pay stakers, X1 Foundation will add its own 0.75% making total of 1% of trading volume be paid to stakers.” That is where the 4x staking bonus banner on the site comes from — 1% total against a 0.25% trader fee is exactly four times the base, with the Foundation covering three of those four parts.

It is a genuinely two-sided arrangement: stakers seed the vault that pays winners, traders pay the fees that pay stakers. The catch is equally clear — with the market halted since April, there is no volume to split, and a 4x multiple of nothing is nothing. Stakers waiting on the relaunch are waiting on the oracle too.

Where the relaunch sits in the queue

Jack's ordering is bridge → oracle → Vero, and the first item is done. The bridge shipped hardened, with, in his words, “more features.” That leaves the oracle as the single blocker.

The plumbing for a return is already in place. vero.x1.xyz is live and currently redirects straight into the 15-minute BTC market on the staging app. And on next.x1.xyz — the consolidated new X1 site Jack unveiled the same day — the ecosystem grid carries a tile reading “Perps & predictions — Coming soon — Go long or short on majors, plus prediction markets.” The slot is reserved.

Jack has also sketched what a version two looks like beyond simply switching the lights back on: more assets than BTC, with SOL the obvious next step, and an interest in traditional markets — stocks, gold, silver — running through the same interface. Possibly user-created markets. “The foundation supports all of this,” he wrote, “it's just a matter of building it out.”

For now the honest read is this: Vero proved the demand, with 308,745 transactions across four contracts and a staking pool people are still holding positions in four months after the last trade settled. What it did not prove is that a single-key oracle can be trusted to decide who wins. Jack has said, publicly and specifically, that this is the thing being fixed before anything reopens. That is the right order to do it in.

Transaction counts sourced from the X1 Agents Radio program catalogue and independently verified against X1 mainnet RPC on Aug 22, 2026.