The X1 Bootstrap Bonus has been paid. 215,874.60 XNT went out on X1 mainnet on 1 November 2026 to the withdrawer addresses of 725 validators, in one transfer per address. Nothing had to be claimed.
Nick Pettas, X1 Labs core developer, announced it in the X1 World group on Telegram:
Bootstrap Bonus v1: program ended, rewards paid ✅
The Bootstrap Bonus program ended on November 1, 2026 at 00:00 UTC, and rewards became final at 00:15 UTC. Every validator’s earned bonus has now been paid out on X1 mainnet.
- 215,874.60 XNT in total
- 725 validators, paid to 523 withdrawer addresses
- One payment per address, which covers all the validators that share that withdrawer
Thank you to every operator who helped bootstrap X1 mainnet.
Nick Pettas, X1 Labs core developer, X1 World, 1 November 2026
It closes the loop on the schedule Pettas posted in early October, covered in X1 Bootstrap Bonus Ends November 1. The program stopped at midnight UTC, final amounts were fixed 15 minutes later, and the money landed the same day. It is the second validator payout in less than a month, after the 5.39 million XNT testnet rewards airdrop on October 6. That one paid for testnet work. This one paid for running mainnet.
We checked the payout on chain
We pulled every transaction from the payer wallet, 5BUYBL...AomC, and read the memos. The numbers match the announcement exactly.
| Item | What the chain shows |
|---|---|
| Payout transfers | 523, all successful |
| Unique withdrawer addresses | 523 (no address paid twice) |
| Sum of the memo amounts | 215,874.600236631 XNT |
| X1 API network total | 215,874.600236631 XNT |
| Payout window | 19:06 to 19:41 UTC, 1 November |
| Median payment per address | 255.06 XNT |
| Largest single payment | 6,596.00 XNT |
Every transfer went through the payout program A8vkSU...D294 and carries a memo in the format Pettas described. The total matches, to the lamport, the cumulativeBootstrapRewards figure in X1’s public cluster API. The payer wallet was funded with 250,000 XNT at 18:47 UTC, and the 34,123.93 XNT that was not needed went back to the funding wallet at 19:42 UTC. The payer now holds nothing.
How to check your own payment
The bonus did not go to the validator identity or the vote account. It went to the vote account’s authorized withdrawer. Pettas says that is the withdrawer recorded on chain when the program ended, and if you closed a vote account, its bonus went to the last withdrawer X1 has on record. X1’s Bootstrap Bonus docs still say the withdrawer “at the time of the payout”. For almost every validator the two are the same address, since the payout came 19 hours after the cutoff.
- Look up your validator on validators.x1.xyz. Its page shows the bonus earned, the epochs that earned it and the address it is paid to. A validator that has stopped voting is not in the list, but pasting its full vote or identity key still opens its page.
- Open that withdrawer wallet’s history in the X1 explorer or in your wallet.
- Look for an incoming transfer on 1 November from
5BUYBLBDcpu29fjdeoKdv3eqpara1PAZgomoRPeYAomC. - The transaction should call the payout program
A8vkSPGKUVWUzRTgeq8EHn7Tv3wqL2miHC72gziwD294. - Its memo reads
x1-bootstrap-bonus:<your withdrawer>:<amount in lamports>. Divide the last number by 1,000,000,000 to get XNT.
If you run several validators with the same withdrawer, there is only one transfer, and its amount is the sum for all of them. That is why 725 validators produced 523 payments. The biggest shared withdrawers each cover nine or ten nodes, and ten is the most that could earn: the rules let only the ten validators with the most eligible stake under one withdrawer qualify in an epoch.
How the bonus was earned
The rules are in X1’s documentation. The bonus paid about 16% a year on up to 10,000 XNT of eligible stake per validator, on top of normal voting rewards, commission and block rewards. It was worked out every epoch from mainnet epoch 37. Each epoch’s pool was split by eligible stake multiplied by vote credits, so a validator with average credits earned about 16% a year on its eligible stake.
Eligible stake means a validator’s own stake plus stake delegated directly from other wallets. Stake held by stake pools did not count, and that includes the X1 Foundation’s delegation program. A validator needed at least 1,000 XNT of it, and only the first 10,000 XNT earned anything.
A validator also had to pass every check below in an epoch to earn that epoch’s share:
| Check | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Active | In the active set and not delinquent |
| Eligible stake | At least 1,000 XNT |
| Commission | 10% or less, at every point in the epoch |
| Vote credits | At least 97% of the network average |
| Skip rate | No more than 110% of the network average |
| Tachyon version | The majority version, newer, or up to two patch releases older |
| Validators per withdrawer | Up to 10 |
The skip-rate check was the strict one. The network skips very few slots, so the limit sat between about 0.08% and 0.41% in late September and early October. The docs give an example from epoch 395: the limit was 0.137%, and a validator that missed 1 of its 264 leader slots, a 0.379% skip rate, earned nothing that epoch. One missed block could cost a day of bonus.
The last epoch to count was 427. Epoch 428 was still running at midnight on November 1, and the rules say the epoch running at the cutoff earns nothing. That makes 391 qualifying epochs, a little over 1.07 years of slots. By our calculation, a single validator with the full 10,000 XNT of eligible stake and average credits in every one of them would have earned about 1,713 XNT.
Where the 215,874 XNT went
The spread is wide. Half of the addresses received less than 255 XNT. 153 addresses got under 100 XNT, while 40 got 1,000 XNT or more. The ten largest payments took 18.6% of the pool, and the top 50 took 44%. Sixteen payments are above about 1,800 XNT. That is more than one validator could earn under the rules, so each of those covers several validators behind one withdrawer.
Two more things stand out in the data. First, X1 Labs’ own 12 validators show zero bonus in the API. The docs say X1 Labs validators do not take part, so none of the pool went to the core team’s nodes. Second, the bonus did not only go to validators still running. X1’s validator list shows 410 current validators with a bonus, worth 176,317 XNT together. The other 39,557 XNT, about 18% of the total, went to validators that have since stopped or closed their vote accounts. That matches the rule Pettas posted in October: former validators still receive what they earned.
The pool also grew a lot after our October snapshot. On October 8, 554 validators had earned 179,270 XNT across 431 withdrawers. The last three weeks added about 36,600 XNT, 171 validators and 92 addresses.
Why it was called v1
Pettas named it “Bootstrap Bonus v1.” The docs use the same name and call the program the first DeFi on X1, with validating as the first activity that pays a yield. Neither Pettas nor the docs say whether a second round is planned, and X1 has announced nothing about one. The program was built to reward operators for joining mainnet in its first months, and that window has now closed. Validators who want ongoing support should look at the Foundation delegation program, which since October 27 requires at least 20,000 XNT of self-stake. The full list of live operators is on our X1 validators page.
For operators, the only job left is to check the withdrawer wallet. If the transfer is missing and you expected one, open your validator on validators.x1.xyz and compare the payout address it shows with the wallet you are checking. If you changed your withdrawer on November 1, check both the old and the new address.