XDC · the chain mints almost nothing, and the validators are swallowing the float.

XDC Network pays its node operators in new coins. The chain's own settings hand out 5,000 XDC every 900 blocks, and the wallet that takes the protocol's 10% share was watched at 22 consecutive payouts across both ends of the window — it took exactly 500 XDC each time, without a single exception. Over the 3,371,433 blocks the chain actually produced in these 90 days that comes to 18.73M XDC, about 0.38% a year. Blocks ran at 2.31 seconds rather than the 2 seconds the settings target, and because the payout is counted in blocks rather than in time, using the target would have overstated this row by 15%.

Nothing unlocked. XDC releases held-back allocations on a once-a-year cliff every Feb 5, so the release either falls inside a window or it does not. The last one was Feb 5 2026 and the next is Feb 5 2027, and neither is anywhere near these 90 days. The three wallets holding the entire held-back reserve were read at both ends of the window and matched to the last decimal, which is the same answer from a different direction.

No discretionary release. Watched as overhang: three reserve wallets holding 13,446.0M, 3,609.2M and 1,225.8M XDC — 18,281.0M between them, which is the whole held-back bucket — every one identical at both ends of the window, delta exactly zero. Also watched: the masternode collateral pool at 3,571.1M XDC, which can unwind about 35 days after an operator resigns, and the reward wallet at 1.3M XDC, whose income is already counted one row above. No public evidence of release in window — monitored.

There is no bankruptcy estate, no trustee and no court-ordered distribution attached to XDC. Nothing sits in this row and nothing is expected to.

There is no buyback. XDC Network runs no programme that spends treasury money buying XDC on the open market, and none was announced or executed in this window. A quarter of institutional partnership news carried nothing of the kind.

A burn exists and it is real, but it is tiny. Every transaction pays a fixed base fee that the chain destroys rather than paying to anyone — the node software credits the block producer with the tip only. Both destruction surfaces were read at both ends of the window: the unspendable address held 0.000007 XDC on both dates and did not move, so nothing is burned by transfer here, and the base fee has no address to read at all. Measured across 671 blocks sampled in three independent draws, it comes to 13.8K XDC over 90 days — 0.00007% of the coins in circulation.

No entity behind XDC Network bought XDC on the open market in this window, and none disclosed an intention to. The reward wallet's balance grew, but that is protocol income arriving on its own rather than demand, so it is tracked as an overhang on the sell side instead of counted here.

This is the whole story of the quarter. Running a node on XDC means posting 10,000,000 XDC into one contract and leaving it there. That contract held 2,660.9M XDC on Jun 10 2026 and 3,571.1M on Sep 8 2026 — a measured change of 910.18M, read at both dates and re-read half an hour later to be certain. The operator count moved 258 to 348 over the same span, and 90 new operators at 10,000,000 each is 900M, which lands within 1.1% of the balance and confirms it from a second direction. It is a genuine lock: an operator must resign and then wait 1,296,000 blocks, about 35 days, before the coins can move. The buyers were named institutions arriving one after another all quarter.