X1 Bootstrap Bonus Ends November 1: Validators Get an Automatic Airdrop Soon After

The X1 Bootstrap Bonus now has an end date. The program stops at 00:00 UTC on 1 November 2026, and what each validator earned is airdropped shortly after to the authorized withdrawer of its vote account. There is nothing to claim. The one job left for operators is to make sure they control that withdrawer address before the payout.

Nick Pettas, X1 Labs core developer, posted the schedule in the X1 validators chat on Telegram on 7 October:

Bootstrap Bonus ends 1 November 2026 at 00:00 UTC.

• Only epochs completed before the cutoff qualify. Final amounts appear at 00:15 UTC.
• Bonuses will be airdropped in shortly after to each vote account’s authorized withdrawer. No claim is needed.
• Shared withdrawers are paid together. Former validators still receive bonuses earned.
• Make sure you control the current authorized withdrawer address.

Nick Pettas, X1 Labs core developer, X1 validators chat, 7 October 2026

It is the second validator payout in a month. On October 6, X1 sent 5.39 million XNT of testnet rewards, covered in X1 Testnet Rewards Airdrop Is Complete. That one paid operators who ran the testnet. The Bootstrap Bonus pays for mainnet work, so validators who joined after genesis and had no testnet rewards are included too.

The dates

The detail that matters is in Pettas’s first bullet. A bonus is earned per epoch, and an epoch only counts if it has finished before the cutoff. X1’s Bootstrap Bonus rules spell it out: “The epoch that is running at the cutoff earns nothing.”

We measured the pace on the morning of October 8. Epoch 402 was running, and over the previous 8.6 million slots the chain averaged 0.3675 seconds per slot, which makes an epoch about 22 hours long. At that pace epoch 427 would be the last one to count, ending around 13:30 UTC on October 31, and epoch 428 would be about ten hours old at the cutoff and earn no bonus. That is our estimate, not an X1 figure, and slot times can drift. It means roughly 26 qualifying epochs are left, including the one running now.

How much is in the bonus so far

X1 publishes the running totals through a public API, the same one behind the validator dashboard. We read it at 09:46 UTC on October 8. The figures are provisional until the cutoff and include an estimate for the current epoch.

• At $0.1857 per XNT, the price on our live XNT price page at the time, the total is worth about $33,300.
• 431 validators have earned 100 XNT or more, 91 have 500 or more and 20 have passed 1,000.
• 44 addresses are the withdrawer for more than one validator, 167 validators between them. As Pettas says, each of those addresses is paid for all of its validators together. The largest, 6,213 XNT, collects for five.
• 106 of the validators with a bonus were delinquent when we looked. They are still owed what they earned.
• The listed validators add up to 172,390 XNT. The remaining 6,900 XNT or so is consistent with validators that have stopped voting, which no longer appear in the list but are still paid.

The bonus is much smaller than the testnet airdrop, and that is by design. It pays a rate on a capped amount of stake, not a share of a fixed pool.

How a validator earns it

The bonus is about 16% a year on up to 10,000 XNT of eligible stake, on top of normal voting rewards, commission and block rewards. It is worked out every epoch and shared between the validators that qualified in that epoch, weighted by eligible stake and vote credits.

In numbers: one epoch is 216,000 slots out of 78,892,314 in a year, so each epoch pays about 0.044% of eligible stake. A validator at the 10,000 XNT cap with average vote credits earns about 4.4 XNT per epoch. Over the 365 epochs completed since epoch 37 that comes to about 1,600 XNT, which is why the top validator sits at 1,536. The 26 or so epochs still to come are worth up to about 114 XNT more for a validator at the cap.

Not all stake counts. Your own stake and stake delegated directly by other wallets do. Stake held by a stake pool does not, and that includes the X1 Foundation delegation program. The minimum is 1,000 XNT of eligible stake.

Each epoch is judged on its own. A validator earns that epoch’s bonus only if it meets every criterion:

The skip-rate rule is the strict one. The network skips very few slots, so the limit is tiny. X1’s own example is epoch 395: the network average was 0.124%, the limit 0.137%, and a validator that skipped 1 of its 264 leader slots was over it. In the docs’ words, “a single skipped leader slot can cost that epoch’s bonus”. The next epoch starts clean, so a bad epoch costs about 4 XNT at most, not the whole bonus.

What to do before November 1

• Check your bonus. On validators.x1.xyz, search by name or paste your vote account or node identity key. The page shows the bonus earned, the epochs that earned it and the address it will be paid to. A validator that has stopped voting is not in the list, but pasting its full key still opens its page.
• Check the withdrawer. The airdrop goes to the authorized withdrawer of the vote account at the time of the payout, not to the identity key and not to an address from the past. That is different from the testnet airdrop, which went to the original genesis address. solana vote-account <VOTE_ACCOUNT> --url https://rpc.mainnet.x1.xyz prints it. If it is a key you no longer hold, an exchange address or a wallet someone else set up for you, change it now with solana vote-authorize-withdrawer-checked while you still can.
• Running several validators? If they share a withdrawer, expect one payment covering all of them.
• Stopped validating? You are still paid what you earned, to the same withdrawer. Make sure you still have that key.
• Keep the node healthy for the last epochs. About 26 epochs remain. Stay on the current Tachyon version, keep commission at 10% or below and avoid restarts close to your leader slots.
• Use the API if you prefer. https://api.x1.xyz/v1/validators/<node identity> returns cumulativeBootstrapRewards in lamports. Divide by 1,000,000,000 for XNT.

Why X1 paid validators first

X1’s docs describe the Bootstrap Bonus as the chain’s first DeFi: “Validating becomes the first DeFi of X1.” The idea was to make running a node the first activity on the chain that paid a yield, so early XNT went into securing the network. Votes on X1 are free, as we showed in our comparison with Solana’s vote fees, so a small operator with 1,000 XNT could qualify.

A year on, the validator set is one of the strongest things X1 has, and the program that helped build it closes on schedule. The docs call it Bootstrap Bonus v1. X1 has not said whether a second version will follow, so validators should plan on normal staking rewards from November. Our state of the network at year one covers where the validator set stands today.

Bonus figures read from api.x1.xyz at 09:46 UTC on October 8, 2026. They are provisional until the cutoff. Slot timing measured from X1 mainnet RPC block times the same morning. XNT price from X1 Report’s live XNT page.