The X1 validator airdrop is done. 5,393,104 XNT landed in validators’ wallets in the first hours of October 6, 2026, one year to the day after mainnet genesis. It is the remaining 90% of the incentivized testnet rewards, plus a 6% staked yield, and it went to the operators who ran X1’s testnet before mainnet existed and kept a validator online through the chain’s first year.
Nick Pettas, X1 Labs core developer, confirmed it in the X1 validators chat on Telegram:
The Incentivized Testnet Rewards airdrop is complete. We’ve sent XNT, including the 6% staked yield, to the original withdraw addresses that received the 10% genesis airdrop. Check your amount at https://testnet-rewards.x1.xyz. Thank you to everyone who ran a testnet validator!
The Bootstrap Bonus is coming next month.
Nick Pettas, X1 Labs core developer, X1 validators chat, 6 October 2026
Jack Levin, X1 Labs CEO, added his own summary in the same chat: “Testnet airdrop is out, everyone is getting lambos ;)”.
We covered the plan two weeks ago in X1 Validator Airdrop Is Coming. At that point no date had been confirmed. Now the payout is on-chain, and the figures below are what was actually sent.
What was paid
X1’s testnet rewards site reads from a public API that now carries a transaction signature for every payment. We read it on the morning of October 6:
| Item | XNT |
|---|---|
| Earned testnet rewards (the locked 90%, scaled by mainnet performance) | 5,059,837 |
| Staked yield (6%, paid on top) | 333,267 |
| Total sent | 5,393,104 |
- 587 testnet accounts were paid, through 467 transactions to 467 addresses. 33 addresses collected for more than one validator.
- The first payment is timestamped 00:44 UTC and the last 01:23 UTC. The whole airdrop took about 40 minutes.
- The median address received about 8,410 XNT. 291 addresses received 5,000 XNT or more, 197 received 10,000 or more, and four received more than 100,000.
- The largest single address received about 152,216 XNT across ten validators.
- One mapped account, due about 27,953 XNT, was not yet marked as paid in the API when we read it. With it, the payable total is 5,421,058 XNT.
There was nothing to claim. As Pettas wrote, the XNT went to the same withdraw address that received the first 10% at genesis on October 6, 2025. If you ran a testnet validator, look up your vote account, identity or withdrawer on the rewards site and compare the amount with your wallet.
At $0.1757 per XNT, the price on our live XNT price page this morning, the airdrop is worth about $948,000, and the median payout about $1,480. For scale, XNT’s market cap was $6.93 million and its fully diluted valuation $189.35 million at the same moment. The two belong together: only about 3.7% of supply is in public hands.
How the amounts were set
The rules are in X1’s Incentivized Testnet Rewards documentation. Testnet vote credits converted at 50,000 credits to 1 XNT. Ten percent was paid at genesis so operators could stake into their own nodes on day one. The other 90% was locked for 365 days and scaled by how each validator performed on mainnet.
The final split of that locked 90%, read from the API after the cutoff at 00:00 UTC on October 6:
| Bucket | XNT |
|---|---|
| Payable to validators with a mainnet node | 5,086,198 |
| Forfeited to performance | 494,808 |
| Testnet accounts with no mainnet validator | 615,789 |
| Locked 90% in total | 6,196,795 |
Validators with a mainnet node kept 91% of their maximum, and 271 of the 587 paid accounts kept 99% or more. The 6% staked yield was worked out on each validator’s full maximum and not reduced for performance, which is why it comes to 334,860 XNT across the network, exactly 6% of 5,581,006.
Next: the Bootstrap Bonus and the investor unlock
Two more dates follow the airdrop closely.
The Bootstrap Bonus. Pettas says it is “coming next month”. The Bootstrap Bonus is the program for validators’ own stake, including operators who started on mainnet and had no testnet rewards to collect. It pays on self-stake between 1,000 and 10,000 XNT for validators that meet the performance criteria.
The investor unlock. After the airdrop message, Levin added: “Investors unlock is tomorrow”. October 6, 2026 is the 12-month cliff in the X1 Labs vesting schedule, when 25% of an exercised allocation becomes eligible to unlock, followed by 36 monthly releases. The mechanics, and why an investor’s first figure can be smaller than expected, are in X1 Labs’ investment round and XNT vesting, explained.
The XNT/USDC.x pool is busier, and LPs are earning more
The airdrop arrives in a market that is more active than it was two weeks ago. Levin is running a market maker bot in the main XNT/USDC.x pool on XDEX, as he said on October 3: “I am running a market maker bot that generates volume.” Every swap in that pool pays a 0.28% fee, and the tracker below counts 70% of it as going to the pool’s liquidity providers.
A public tracker, XNT/USDC LP Rewards, reads the pool’s swaps from the chain and shows what each LP wallet earned. Its numbers for the seven days to 07:43 UTC on October 6:
- $214,358 of swap volume in 19,858 swaps.
- $420.15 of fees earned by LPs, paid as 832.58 XNT and 206.67 USDC.x.
- 79.8% of those fees, $335.31, came from the wallet the tracker labels as the bot.
- 44 wallets hold the pool’s LP token and share the fees in proportion.
The daily figures show the change. Before the bot started, LPs in this pool earned about $7 to $9 a day between them:
| Day (UTC) | LP fees, USD |
|---|---|
| Sep 30 | 8.47 |
| Oct 1 | 7.04 |
| Oct 2 | 24.46 |
| Oct 3 | 219.07 |
| Oct 4 | 72.48 |
| Oct 5 | 20.47 |
| Oct 6, first 7 h 43 min | 62.95 |
The bot’s volume varies from day to day, so the fees do too. Airdrop day stands out for a different reason. By 07:43 UTC, traders other than the bot had already paid LPs $30.90, more than on any full day earlier in the week. New XNT in validators’ wallets is showing up as real trading.
Pooled XNT liquidity on X1 stood at about $9,500 this morning. That is small next to a $948,000 airdrop, so anyone moving size should check the quote first, split the order or use the OTC desk. It is also the reason the fee numbers matter: fees are what pay people to add depth. Our XDEX farming explainer covers how providing liquidity works.
What validators can do with it
- Check the amount. Look up your address on testnet-rewards.x1.xyz and compare it with what arrived. Report any mismatch in the X1 validators chat.
- Check your self-stake. The X1 Foundation delegation program requires a minimum self-stake of 5,000 XNT, and 291 addresses just received that much or more in one transaction. Our delegation program guide explains what clearing the floor is worth.
- Plan for the Bootstrap Bonus. It counts self-stake between 1,000 and 10,000 XNT, so XNT staked into your own validator now is working before the bonus arrives.
- Consider the pool. Adding liquidity to XNT/USDC.x earns a share of every swap, and the tracker shows exactly how much each LP wallet has made.
A year of mainnet, a testnet before it, and the rewards arrived on the first day they could. Thank you to everyone who kept a node running.
Airdrop figures read from api.x1.xyz on October 6, 2026, after the payout. XNT price, market cap and liquidity from X1 Report’s live XNT page, and LP figures from xnt-usdc-lp-rewards.vercel.app, at about 07:45 UTC the same day.