X1 is the largest fork of Solana. It runs the same Solana Virtual Machine, the same programs and the same inflation formula, with more than 400 validators voting on a chain that went live in October 2025. Same engine, one year old. So the interesting question is no longer whether X1 works. It is what X1 can do that Solana, and most other chains, cannot.
The short answer is economics. In the last few weeks X1 Labs founder Jack Levin has announced a burn of 85 million XNT, said burns will become a quarterly habit, shown an exchange counter that turns its spread into XNT buybacks, and laid out a plan to put 5% of the token supply on Solana. None of that is possible on Solana itself, for a simple reason: the Solana Foundation does not own most of SOL. The X1 Foundation owns almost half of XNT.
This piece puts those plans together with live on-chain numbers, read on October 26, 2026, and asks where the X1 blockchain could have a real edge.
Solana's oldest criticism: inflation
Every Solana bear has the same chart. New SOL is issued to stakers every epoch, so the supply keeps growing and every holder who does not stake is diluted. Levin, in his October 22 interview with X1 Report, called it “a silly argument, but it is kind of somewhat true”: SOL was around $250 three years ago and touched $250 again recently, yet those two prices are not the same market cap. With constant inflation, he said, a token has to work just to stand still.
X1 inherited Solana's schedule exactly. Inflation starts at 8% a year, falls by 15% each year and stops at a long-term floor of 1.5%. The difference is the clock. Solana started down that curve in 2021. X1 started in October 2025, so it sits almost four years behind.
getInflationRate on both mainnets. X1 reaches the 1.5% floor around 2036, Solana around 2032.On a schedule alone, X1 looks worse: higher inflation for longer. That is exactly why the burn matters.
The burn that turns X1 deflationary, for a while
On October 21, a few hours after Solana switched on Alpenglow, Levin announced that 85,000,000 XNT will be burned as a tribute: Alpenglow cut Solana's finality roughly 85 times. In the interview he explained that the real idea is older. He wanted to burn “all of the inflation that happened this last year”.
The arithmetic is striking. X1's total supply read 1,081,847,784 XNT on October 26. Taking 85 million out leaves about 996.8 million, below the 1,000,000,000 XNT created at genesis a year earlier. For a while, the SVM would be deflationary: X1 would have less supply a year after launch than it started with, something Solana's supply has never done.
The burn has been announced but has not been executed yet. On October 26 the incinerator address still held nothing and total supply had not dropped. We will report the transaction when it lands.
The bigger news is that it will not be a one-off. “I think we probably will be burning once a quarter,” Levin said. The target is to hold total supply around one billion:
“Ideally, if we stay at about 1 billion supply and burn every quarter to hit the 1 billion supply target, then we don't have the inflation eroding the value of the token.”
Held at one billion, XNT would behave like a fixed supply token even though stakers are still paid in new coins. Each quarter's burn would be roughly 16 to 17 million XNT at today's rate, falling as inflation declines.
Why fees cannot do it yet
Like Solana, X1 burns part of every transaction fee: half of it, priority fees included. On X1 that adds up to almost nothing. When we measured it for the burn story, the network burned roughly 8,900 to 14,000 XNT a year through fees. Annual issuance is about 66 million XNT. Even ten times today's on-chain activity would burn well under 1% of new supply. Fees are low on purpose: Levin wants them close to zero, just high enough to stop spam.
So the burns will be manual for now, a decision by the Foundation each quarter. Levin left the door open to something programmatic later, whether from block fees or from buy and burn funded by app revenue: “If there's some juicy activity happening, maybe we can connect to that. But for now, we'll just do it manually, because it's very simple.”
The real edge: a treasury that can act
Burning 85 million coins only works because X1 owns them. The genesis allocation X1 published puts about 464 million XNT, 46.4% of genesis, in a Foundation reserve with no vesting. Levin made the contrast himself: the Ethereum Foundation holds about 1% of ETH or less, and Solana's foundation does not hold much either. A burn from them would barely register.
“We can do it because we have a lot of it, and we would rather have all of the investors have more of a supply percentage.”
That reserve is X1's biggest strategic asset. It can fund burns, back liquidity on Solana, pay for partnerships and keep the chain running through a bear market without selling into the open market. Most new chains have none of that room: their tokens sit with venture funds that sell at unlock. X1's investor line is only about 2% of genesis, part of it raised from its own community on Wefunder. You can follow every holder group, the circulating float and the staking split on our XNT price page.
Concentration cuts both ways, and the burn shows the good side. Nothing about the reserve is locked on chain, so its value depends on how it is used. So far, the first big use is destroying 85 million coins to make everyone else's share larger.
As fast as Solana: Alpenglow is coming
Speed is the other half of the story. Solana's Alpenglow voting protocol, live since October 21, replaced on-chain vote transactions with aggregated BLS certificates and cut finality from about 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds. X1 still runs the older TowerBFT consensus, with 367 ms slots and finality around 11 seconds.
Levin has said X1 will adopt Alpenglow once it has been running on Solana for a while. No date has been set. When it happens, X1 should match Solana's finality while keeping its own fee schedule, and the vote transactions that make up over 99% of X1's transaction count today would disappear from blocks, as they did on Solana.
Fast and cheap is exactly what AI agents need. An agent that pays per API call, rebalances a position every minute or runs a market-making loop sends thousands of transactions a day. On most chains the fees add up to a real bill. On X1 they round to zero, and X1 Labs is already designing x402 payments with bounded budgets agents can spend.
Cheap enough to build on mainnet first
X1's developer page puts the pitch in one line: “If it runs on Solana, it runs on X1.” Point the RPC at X1 and deploy the same program. That makes X1 a natural place for Solana teams to launch on a live mainnet with real users and real tokens before they spend real money on Solana.
Here is what that costs on each chain, from getFeeForMessage and getMinimumBalanceForRentExemption on both mainnets, at XNT $0.2596 and SOL $100.55:
| Cost | X1 | Solana |
|---|---|---|
| Base fee per signature | 1,500 lamports ($0.0000004) | 5,000 lamports ($0.0005) |
| Rent for a 1 MB DeFi program account | 6.96 XNT ($1.81) | 5.08 SOL ($511) |
| Capital tied up while deploying it (program plus write buffer) | 13.9 XNT ($3.61) | 10.2 SOL ($1,022) |
| One user token account (165 bytes) | 0.00204 XNT ($0.0005) | 0.00149 SOL ($0.15) |
| A keeper bot sending one transaction a second for a year, base fee only | 47.3 XNT ($12) | 157.7 SOL ($15,855) |
Two honest notes. First, X1 charges more lamports of rent than Solana; it is cheaper in dollars because XNT is priced far below SOL. Rent is also a refundable deposit, returned when an account closes. Second, the fee gap is not only about price. X1's base fee is 1,500 lamports against Solana's 5,000, so even if XNT and SOL cost the same, an X1 transaction would still be 3.3 times cheaper, before Solana's priority fees in busy periods.
Solana's devnet is free too, but it is a test network: nobody trades there, and nothing is worth anything. X1 offers a mainnet with a DEX, a bridge and users, for the price of a devnet. Our list of Solana projects that should deploy on X1 covers which programs are already live here and which are missing.
Yield: where X1 pays more
Higher inflation has an upside: it is paid to stakers. On a plain staking comparison, X1 pays more than Solana:
| October 26, 2026 | X1 | Solana |
|---|---|---|
| Annual inflation | 6.67% | 3.59% |
| Share of supply staked | 91.5% | 68.8% |
| Gross staking yield (issuance to stakers ÷ stake) | 6.9% | 5.2% |
| Median validator commission | 10% | 5% |
| Delegator yield after median commission | about 6.2% | about 5.0%, plus MEV tips |
That is better, not dramatically better. Where X1 is in a league of its own is running a validator. The Foundation's delegation program spreads about 299 million XNT across 452 approved validators, around 660,000 XNT each. From October 27, under Capybara, a validator needs 20,000 XNT of its own stake to qualify. At a 10% commission, commission on the delegated stake plus rewards on its own stake comes to roughly 6,000 XNT a year: about 30% on the operator's 20,000 XNT. Levin, describing the program before the floor went up, put delegated yields at “more like 300%”.
“They can buy and stake, and they can earn extra 300% yield that no blockchain is giving to anybody. We're very generous with our yield, because we want you guys to have the yield. But we also want you guys to be the buyers.”
In dollars, at today's price, 6,000 XNT is about $1,550 a year, which does not yet cover a bare-metal server. The yield is paid in XNT, and that is the point: it is a way to accumulate a large position while the token is cheap, a bet on where XNT goes rather than on today's price. Few chains of X1's size offer anything comparable. For delegators, our X1 staking guide compares validators.
Not a walled garden: 5% of XNT on Solana
The most important strategic choice X1 has made is not to compete with Solana for users, but to plug into Solana's liquidity. Three pieces are in motion.
The Terminal. Levin's exchange counter sells XNT at one fixed rate and buys it back at a lower one, with no slippage. The spread is kept in USDC, and he wants that USDC used to buy XNT on XDEX and “potentially” burn it. He hoped for an early November launch; that date is not confirmed. He wants a version on Solana too. The demo is in our interview.
XCORE. A Solana token designed for traders that pays its holders in wXNT, the bridged XNT. Every trade fee buys wXNT from a Solana pool. The design has moved from a fixed $1 sale to a buy-only bonding curve, and the allocations are still open. The goal is deep XNT liquidity on Solana, so Solana traders can buy XNT without ever leaving Phantom or Jupiter.
50 million XNT for Solana. The genesis table earmarks 5% of supply for Solana liquidity. “We want 50M of liquidity on Solana,” Levin said in an October 25 X Space. The starting point is small: on October 26 there were 15,815 wXNT on Solana and about $2,400 in its pools. The target is more than 3,000 times that.
The logic is simple. Every wXNT on Solana is one XNT locked in the Warp bridge vault on X1. If Solana buyers push wXNT above the X1 price, arbitrageurs buy XNT on X1, bridge it and sell it on Solana. So even if Solana traders never bridge or touch X1 themselves, their buying moves the XNT price. X1 grows by joining Solana's market, not by closing itself off from it.
Hyperliquid-style buybacks need USDC. Where from?
Levin has said he will pursue more mechanisms that create XNT buybacks, in the style of Hyperliquid, which sends nearly all of its trading fees to buying back HYPE. Buybacks need a steady income in dollars. These are the sources visible today. Only the first two have been described by Levin; the rest are our reading of what already exists:
- The Terminal's spread. Every buy above the market rate and every sell below it leaves USDC in the program.
- XCORE. A small claim fee and the USDC raised on the bonding curve.
- XDEX on two chains. XDEX is already a dual-chain DEX: its API serves Solana Mainnet as well as X1. Trading fees from Solana pools are dollar income from Solana's volume.
- The Warp bridge. Transfers pay 0.25% in the token, and USDC transfers pay a flat 1 USDC.
- Payments. If agents and apps settle in stablecoins on X1, as the W2 x402 design proposes, a small cut of that flow could fund buybacks too.
Put together, the model looks like this: fees and spreads earned in dollars, used to buy XNT, with part of it burned, on top of quarterly treasury burns that cancel inflation. That is a different economic model from Solana's, where the protocol has no treasury to deploy and inflation simply runs.
The people behind it
An economic model is only as good as the team running it. Levin's career is built on making distributed systems fast and cheap. He was Google's 21st employee and wired 2,000 servers in a week. He built ImageShack, the image host that carried early Twitter, then co-founded Nventify, whose Imagizer engine resizes images on the fly. He launched XEN on Ethereum, which he says reached more wallets than HEX, and then X1. X1 Labs is four people.
The community is the other asset. Many layer 2 networks bought their users with airdrops, and the airdrop hunters left as soon as the tokens arrived. X1 grew the other way: validators who have run nodes since testnet, a culture of first principles and research, and members who learn to build. That culture is now amplified by AI. In the Cyberdyne Telegram group, anyone can open a topic and build on X1 with Theo, an AI agent wired into the live chain and the latest docs, as advertised on X1's developer page. Most chains offer a docs site. X1 offers a builder that answers back.
“Stripe for Web3”
X1 Labs pitched itself to investors as “Stripe for Web3: blockchain software development and infrastructure operations”. Read against everything above, the pieces fit: payments need fast finality and fees close to zero, agents need cheap blockspace, and a company with infrastructure skills and a large treasury can sign partnerships that a pure protocol cannot. The full plan has not been made public. What is visible is a team pulling the levers only X1 has.
What is still open
- The 85 million XNT burn is announced but not yet on chain.
- Quarterly burns are Levin's stated intention, not a published schedule. No programmatic burn exists yet.
- The Terminal's rates, XCORE's allocations and the 50 million XNT Solana liquidity plan are still being decided.
- Alpenglow adoption has no date.
- XNT liquidity is thin on both chains: the main XDEX pool held about $9,750 on October 26.
X1 runs Solana's technology with a different hand of cards: a treasury it can burn, yields it can afford to pay and blockspace it can sell for almost nothing. If the burns arrive on schedule and the Solana liquidity follows, the largest fork of Solana could end up with the economic model Solana's critics always asked for. Follow the story on our X1 news page, and find every official X1 app and channel on Official Links.