XDC Network (XDC) - the full guide

1. TL;DR

XDC Network is an EVM-compatible layer-1 blockchain that launched its mainnet on June 1, 2019. It was built by XinFin Fintech Pte. Ltd., a Singapore company incorporated in June 2017, and it positions itself as infrastructure for trade finance and the tokenization of real-world assets. ^[14][16][17]

The network's native token is XDC. It pays transaction fees, which are tiny (a simple transfer costs a fraction of a cent), and it is the asset that must be locked to run a block-producing node: 10,000,000 XDC per masternode. ^[7][1][4]

XDC does not use mining. It uses XinFin Delegated Proof of Stake (XDPoS), in which 108 KYC-verified masternodes take turns producing blocks roughly every two seconds. Since the "XDC 2.0" upgrade activated on October 2, 2024, the consensus engine has been a HotStuff-style Byzantine fault tolerant protocol with deterministic finality. ^{[1][11][5][14]}

Supply is not capped. About 37.5 billion XDC were created at genesis; according to the project's own MiCA white paper, 40 percent went to founders and team, 27 percent to ecosystem development, 27 percent to a pre-placement round and 6 percent to a contingency fund. In August 2025 the same document reported about 38.1 billion total supply, of which 21.5 billion was "team controlled (locked)." ^[14]

The adoption picture needs careful reading. Circle's native USDC has been live on XDC since September 17, 2025, and a Liechtenstein-regulated trade finance token was issued on the chain in 2022. Most other headline partnerships are announcements or pilots, and the "ISO 20022 compliant" label is a design claim by the project, not a certification. ^[26][35][6]

The main things to understand before you hold XDC: the "xdc" versus "0x" address prefix, the retired XDCE ERC-20 token, the fact that most of the supply is still held by insiders under vesting, and that only 108 KYC-gated nodes validate the chain. ^[2][14][1]

2. Live stats

The figures below update automatically from public market data; everything else on this page was checked at the time of writing.

3. What problem does it try to solve

Imagine a coffee exporter in Brazil shipping to a buyer in Germany. The exporter wants to be paid when the goods leave port; the buyer wants to pay when they arrive. The gap is bridged by trade finance: a bank or investor advances money against documents such as a bill of lading, an invoice or a letter of credit. This paperwork is still largely physical, slow to verify and expensive to fund, and smaller exporters are often turned away. Industry estimates of the unmet demand for trade finance run into trillions of dollars; the GTR coverage of XDC cites a 1.7 trillion dollar gap. ^[35]

XDC Network's pitch is to put these instruments on a shared ledger. A digitally signed bill of lading can be checked by anyone with the right permissions, an invoice can be tokenized and sold to investors in small pieces, and the whole process can settle in a stablecoin on the same chain. The project's own description is "an enterprise-grade Layer 1 blockchain built for everyone," optimized for tokenizing trade finance instruments and real-world assets. ^[17]

The design choice that follows from this goal is a "hybrid" network. The public chain is open for anyone to read and transact, but the nodes that produce blocks must pass KYC and lock a large stake, and companies can run private "subnets" that keep business data off the public ledger while periodically anchoring to it. The idea is to look familiar to banks and regulators while staying a public network. ^[13][8]

Why should an ordinary reader care? Because trade finance is a field where several well-funded blockchain consortia have already failed, including we.trade in 2022, Marco Polo in early 2023 and Contour at the end of 2023. The question for XDC is whether a public chain with a token can succeed where bank-owned private networks did not. The rest of this guide separates what has been shipped from what has been announced. ^{[37][38][39][48]}

4. History, founders, organization and governance

XinFin and the 2017-2018 token sale

XinFin Fintech Pte. Ltd. was incorporated in Singapore in June 2017 with paid-up capital of 62,500 Singapore dollars, according to the MiCA white paper published for the token. Its co-founders are Atul Khekade and Ritesh Kakkad; a 2018 press release names Karan Bharadwaj as CTO. The company's own "about" page says the network was founded in 2017 and describes XDC Network as "formerly XinFin Network." ^[14][16][47]

Funding came from a token sale. In 2017 XinFin pre-mined about 37.5 billion XDC and ran a private placement; in 2018 it sold an Ethereum-based ERC-20 proxy token called XDCE, launched on February 5, 2018, which was designed to be swapped 1:1 for native XDC once the mainnet existed. A March 2018 release reported "over 1.5 million" raised in pre-crowd sales; we could not verify the total raised from a primary source. ^[14][46][47]

The mainnet went live on June 1, 2019. Holders swapped XDCE for native XDC, and the XDCE contract was later retired after community-led burns of 300 million and then 10 million XDCE in 2021. ^[14]

The XDC Foundation and other entities

In 2021 XinFin funded the creation of the XDC Foundation, described in the MiCA white paper as a not-for-profit supporting development, governance coordination, education and community engagement, with a registered address in Grand Cayman. A 2022 legal memo commissioned by the Foundation states that XinFin "provided a grant for the establishment of the independent XDC Foundation." The xdc.org website carries the Foundation's copyright. ^[14][15][17]

Two further companies appear in the official documents: TradeFinex Tech Ltd. in Abu Dhabi, developer of the TradeFinex trade finance application, and the original XinFin Fintech in Singapore, which the MiCA white paper names as the offeror of the token. XinFin also still runs the first three masternodes it brought online at launch, which the 2022 memo put at under 3 percent of masternodes. ^[14][15]

How the protocol is governed

Protocol upgrades are published by the core engineering team as release notes and announcements on docs.xdc.network and the xdc.dev community site, and masternode operators must upgrade their software before a hard fork block. The XDC 2.0 upgrade, for example, was announced in August 2024 with activation at block 80,370,000 on October 2, 2024. A later consensus-breaking release, v2.6.8, activated EIP-1559 at block 98,800,200. ^[10][11][20]

The 2021 technical white paper also describes an on-chain mechanism in which more than two thirds of validators can vote to slash a misbehaving node. The MiCA white paper mentions a community DAO (DAOFIN, renamed XDCDAO) created in 2023 to decentralize grant decisions. We found no formal on-chain process by which token holders vote on protocol changes. ^[13][14]

5. The technology, explained simply

Delegated proof of stake with a fixed committee

In proof-of-stake networks, the right to produce blocks is tied to locked coins. XDPoS is a delegated variant with a hard cap: only the top 108 candidates by stake become active masternodes, and each must lock at least 10,000,000 XDC and complete a KYC process. Other qualified candidates become "standby" nodes that hold a full copy of the chain and can step in if an active masternode drops out. ^[1][4]

A useful analogy is a rotating panel of 108 notaries. Each one has posted a large bond and shown identification. They take turns writing the next page of a shared ledger, and a page only counts once at least two thirds of the panel have signed it. If a notary misses their turn or signs two conflicting pages, the others can penalize them. ^[13][14]

Blocks arrive about every two seconds. An "epoch" is 900 blocks, roughly 30 minutes, at the end of which rewards are tallied and the committee for the next epoch is set. ^[1][3]

What XDC 2.0 changed

The original 2019 consensus was based on Istanbul BFT with "double validation." In 2021 a team at Hash Laboratories published a design for "XDC Consensus Engine DPoS 2.0" built on HotStuff, a Byzantine fault tolerant protocol used by several modern chains, with an added "forensics" layer that lets the network prove, from signed messages alone, which nodes misbehaved if more than a third collude. ^[22][23][5]

That design went live on mainnet on October 2, 2024. The MiCA white paper describes the result as a move "from probabilistic finality to 6-second (3-block) deterministic finality," with every block finalized by signatures from at least two thirds of the 108 active validators. The architecture docs quote a slightly faster 2-4 seconds; treat the exact figure as a few seconds and check the docs for current values. ^[11][14][1]

The same upgrade raised transaction fees by what the release notes call 50 times (the post's own worked example shows closer to 20 times), disabled the built-in XDCx exchange module, and made the 0x address scheme the default in node software, with the "xdc" prefix kept as an optional flag. Even after the increase, the docs put a simple transfer at about 0.000005 XDC at the recommended 0.25 Gwei gas price. ^[11][7]

EVM compatibility, token standards and subnets

XDC's node software is a fork of go-ethereum, so Solidity contracts, MetaMask, Hardhat and the other Ethereum tools work with little change. The mainnet chain ID is 50, the Apothem testnet is 51, and token standards are called XRC-20, XRC-721 and XRC-1155, mirroring Ethereum's ERC standards. The mainnet supports the Shanghai EVM version and, since early 2026, EIP-1559 fee markets, which were first trialled on the Apothem testnet in February 2025. ^{[19][2][9][1][20][12]}

Subnets are permissioned chains that a company or consortium runs with its own validators, using the XDC 2.0 consensus engine. They periodically send checkpoints to a smart contract on the public mainnet, so the public chain acts as an audit anchor while business data stays private. The documentation lists target use cases (CBDC pilots, trade finance, supply chains) but names no live subnet deployment. ^[8]

Client diversity and security record

There is one node implementation, maintained in the XinFinOrg GitHub organization. An August 2024 assessment co-authored by a XinFin staff member found 414 of 429 observed nodes running the identical client build, which the authors themselves flagged as a risk, along with a geographic concentration of nodes in Germany (132) and Singapore (129). The XDPoSChain repository had 59 stars and 72 forks at the time of writing. ^[24][19][21]

We found no public post-mortem of a prolonged mainnet outage, but we also found no independent uptime audit. The one incident we could document is minor: after the 2.0 upgrade, operators reported node IP addresses and RPC ports left exposed by the new configuration, and a fix was issued. ^[11]

6. The token

Supply

XDC has no maximum supply. The MiCA white paper is explicit: "The supply of XDC tokens is uncapped." About 37.5 billion were pre-mined at genesis, new XDC are minted as block rewards, and a portion of fees is burned. The document reported total supply of 38,109,919,133 XDC in August 2025. ^[14]

Circulating supply is where sources diverge. The MiCA white paper counted 16.63 billion circulating in August 2025, after subtracting 21.48 billion "team controlled (locked)." At the time of writing CoinGecko showed about 19.95 billion circulating and 38.07 billion total, while CoinMarketCap showed 21.48 billion circulating. The difference comes from how each counts staked masternode deposits and vesting allocations. ^[14][33][34]

Distribution

The genesis allocation, as disclosed in the MiCA white paper, is below.

Two points follow. First, more than half of all XDC was held by the team and related entities under vesting as of August 2025, by the project's own count. Second, the contingency fund's vesting is "not specified" and the document says treasury "vesting details are not publicly disclosed." We found no quarterly treasury report. ^[14]

Issuance and rewards

The rewards page of the documentation describes 5,000 XDC per 900-block epoch, with 10 percent to the foundation and the rest to active and standby nodes, and quotes a target of 10 percent annual return for a masternode (1,000,000 XDC a year on a 10,000,000 stake) and 8 percent for a standby node. The same page labels parts of the system "proposed," and its per-epoch and per-year figures do not reconcile exactly, so treat the numbers as indicative. The 2021 white paper described a split of 40 percent to the masternode, 50 percent to its voters and 10 percent to the foundation. A September 2024 research proposal from within the ecosystem argued that the staking model needed redesign for sustainability and decentralization, which suggests these parameters may change. ^[3][13][25]

Since 2024 an independent liquid staking service lets holders with less than 10,000,000 XDC earn a share of masternode rewards, according to the MiCA white paper. We did not verify that service and do not name it here. ^[14]

Utility

XDC is the gas token for every transaction and contract call, the stake required to validate, and the only crypto asset accepted for the TRADA trade finance token issued in 2022. Under MiCA the project classifies XDC as an "other" crypto-asset, explicitly not a utility token in the regulation's sense. ^{[7][4][35][14]}

7. Real adoption

We separate three kinds of evidence: live production usage that can be checked on-chain or in regulator documents, announcements and pilots, and narratives we could not verify.

8. The ISO 20022 connection

ISO 20022 is a messaging standard for financial institutions: a shared dictionary and XML or JSON format for describing payments, statements and related data. SWIFT and most major payment systems use it. It is a standard for how banks describe a transaction, not a certification that a blockchain can earn. Our ISO 20022 explainer covers the standard itself.

What XDC's documentation actually claims is narrower than the slogan. The enterprise docs say the network is "designed with ISO 20022 compatibility" and show how five message types (pacs.008, pacs.009, camt.053, pain.001 and head.001) can be mapped to fields in a Solidity contract and to an XDC transaction hash, with sample middleware that converts between XML and the chain. The page names no live user and does not say the code is audited. ^[6]

The other pillar is Impel, a company that launched in June 2022 with an API it says follows ISO 20022, running on XDC with optional XDC collateral for settlement and a bridge to R3 Corda. At launch, what was live was a self-paced demo on mainnet; banks were described as being in a pilot program and none were named. We found no later primary source confirming production bank traffic. ^[40]

The fair summary: XDC has published a concrete, if illustrative, mapping of ISO 20022 fields onto its chain, and its leadership includes people with deep SWIFT backgrounds. That is compatibility work. A formal designation, a SWIFT integration, or a named bank sending ISO 20022 messages through XDC in production is not something we could verify. ^[6][16]

9. Ecosystem and competitors

Inside the ecosystem

Circle cited "more than 175 apps, protocols, and participants" on XDC's ecosystem page when it launched USDC there. The pieces most relevant to the trade finance thesis are TradeFinex (XinFin's own tokenization application), XDC Trade Network (electronic trade documents), and the stablecoin rails: native USDC plus the LayerZero and Stargate bridges mentioned in project materials. Wallet support includes MetaMask (XDC is in its network list), Trust Wallet and hardware-compatible wallets such as D'CENT and OneKey. ^{[27][14][2][45]}

Competitors in trade finance

The most important comparison is not with other tokens but with the bank consortia that tried the same thing on private ledgers. we.trade (12 European banks) ran out of money in June 2022; Marco Polo Network (30-plus banks, on Corda) went into liquidation in February 2023 owing about 5.2 million euros; Contour (nine banks including HSBC, Citi and Standard Chartered) shut on November 30, 2023 after processing only 60-70 transactions a month. Komgo was the one major survivor. The lesson these failures taught is that integrating banks' back offices is slow and expensive, a hurdle XDC faces too. ^{[37][38][39][48]}

Competitors in tokenization and payments

For stablecoin settlement and real-world asset tokenization, XDC competes with much larger public chains. Ethereum and its layer-2s hold most tokenized assets; Stellar hosts Franklin Templeton's money fund and MoneyGram ramps; the XRP Ledger and Polygon were XDC's named rivals for Brazilian issuance; Hedera and Algorand also court institutions. Even in XDC's strongest market, Brazil, VERT has issued on XRPL as well. ^[43][42]

Size and liquidity

At the time of writing CoinGecko ranked XDC around 97th by market capitalization with roughly 7.6 million dollars of daily volume across 53 markets, led by Kraken, Gate, KuCoin, Bybit and MEXC. That is thin liquidity for a network that wants institutions to settle trade flows on it. ^[33]

10. Regulation and legal history

United States

No US regulator has brought an action against XinFin, the XDC Foundation or the token, as far as we could find. In July 2022 the Foundation commissioned a memorandum from a US law firm analyzing XDC under the Howey test. It concluded there are "generally strong arguments in favor of the determination that $XDC is not a security," citing consumptive uses and masternode governance, while noting the SEC "could disagree." The memo was prepared for the Foundation only, is based on information the Foundation supplied, and is not a regulator's view. ^[15] XDC is also not among the assets the SEC named as examples of digital commodities in its March 2026 interpretive release. The release says an asset does not need to be on that list to be a digital commodity, so the omission is neither a classification nor a warning. ^[49]

XDC is listed on Kraken, which serves US customers, and the MiCA white paper also names Binance.US. ^[31][14]

European Union

For MiCA, the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, XinFin Fintech is named as the offeror in a crypto-asset white paper dated August 2025 that classifies XDC as an "other" token, neither e-money nor asset-referenced. The document was "prepared by the MiCA Crypto Alliance," an industry group, and states that it has not been approved by any competent authority; under MiCA, white papers for existing tokens are notified rather than approved. It is a disclosure document, not a license, and we did not find it in ESMA's interim register of white papers (last updated 2026-10-07). ^[14][50]

In regulated European markets, 21Shares' XDC staking ETP trades on Euronext Amsterdam and Paris and, since August 2025, on SIX Swiss Exchange. Kraken offers XDC against EUR and GBP. ^[44][31]

Other jurisdictions

The TRADA token's prospectus was approved by Liechtenstein's financial regulator in 2022. In Japan, SBI VC Trade began handling XDC in May 2023, which required the asset to clear that exchange's self-regulatory listing process. The 2022 memo also records XinFin's participation in regulatory sandboxes earlier in its history. ^[35][14][15]

Overall: no litigation, a favorable but privately commissioned legal opinion, a MiCA disclosure document, and listings on several regulated venues. No regulator has issued a classification of XDC itself. ^[15][14]

11. Key risks

Insider concentration and uncapped supply. By the project's own August 2025 numbers, 21.5 of 38.1 billion XDC were team-controlled and locked, the contingency fund's vesting is undisclosed, and there is no maximum supply. Large scheduled unlocks are a structural source of selling pressure. ^[14]

A small, gated validator set. 108 KYC-verified masternodes, each with a 10,000,000 XDC bond, validate the chain, and the founding company publishes every upgrade. A 2024 study found most nodes running one identical client build and clustered in two countries. This is more centralized than permissionless networks with thousands of validators. ^[1][4][24]

Single client, small developer base. One node implementation forked from go-ethereum, maintained by one organization with modest GitHub activity, means a critical bug has no alternative client to fall back on. ^[19][24]

Adoption that is mostly announced. Apart from native USDC and the 2022 TRADA issuance, the large partnerships (VERT's 1 billion dollars, SBI's joint venture, Securitize, Archax) are commitments or integrations rather than audited volumes. Trade finance consortia with far larger bank backing have already failed. ^[42][41][37]

Documentation inconsistencies. Official pages disagree with each other on finality (2-4 seconds versus 6 seconds), reward arithmetic, node counts and the network's age. This makes independent verification harder. ^{[1][14][3][17]}

Thin liquidity. Daily volume in the single-digit millions of dollars means large orders move the price, and a delisting from one major exchange would matter. ^[33]

Regulatory uncertainty. There is no regulator-issued classification of XDC in the US or EU; the favorable legal analysis was commissioned by the Foundation and warns that the SEC could take a different view. ^[15]

Operational pitfalls. The xdc/0x prefix, the retired XDCE token and wrong-network withdrawals have caused real user losses; see chapter 14. ^[2][45]

This page is educational. Nothing here is investment advice.

12. Bull case vs bear case

Bull case. Supporters note that XDC is still running while bank-owned trade finance ledgers such as Marco Polo and Contour shut down, and that it has done so with a working public EVM chain that settles in seconds for a small fraction of a cent. It has verifiable footholds that many small chains lack: native USDC issued by Circle, a 2022 trade finance token issued under a prospectus approved in Liechtenstein, a TradeTrust integration for electronic trade documents, and regulated access through Kraken and a 21Shares staking ETP. If even a fraction of VERT's announced 1 billion dollar pipeline and the Archax or Securitize integrations become live volume, the chain would carry real institutional flows at a very low cost per transaction, and a leadership team with deep SWIFT backgrounds knows the bank side of that problem. ^{[37][38][39][26][35][36][31][44][42][41][16]}

Bear case. Skeptics reply that trade finance digitization has repeatedly failed on bank back-office integration rather than on technology, and a public chain does not remove that hurdle. XDC's supply is uncapped, and by the project's own August 2025 figures about 56 percent was team-controlled and locked, alongside a contingency fund whose vesting is undisclosed. Block production is limited to 108 KYC-gated masternodes running one client, and apart from USDC and TRADA the headline partnerships remain announcements. Larger chains with deeper liquidity hold most tokenized assets, XDC's own daily trading volume is in the single-digit millions of dollars, and "ISO 20022 compliant" is the project's own wording rather than a status granted by SWIFT or a standards body. ^{[37][14][1][24][42][41][43][33][6]}

Both cases rest on verifiable facts; they differ on whether announced institutional pipelines will turn into live volume that needs XDC. The reader decides. Three verifiable things both sides can watch: USDC supply on XDC, named issuances that appear on the explorer, and the unlock schedule of team-controlled tokens. ^[28][18][14]

13. Scorecard

Scores follow the rubric used for every coin on this site; the rationale for each category is shown in the card.

14. How to buy and store

Before the exchange and wallet list, four XDC-specific pitfalls that cause most lost funds.

1. The "xdc" versus "0x" address prefix. XDC addresses are ordinary 20-byte Ethereum-style addresses, but the network historically displays them with an "xdc" prefix instead of "0x." The official docs state: "XDC uses xdc prefix instead of 0x," and advise replacing "xdc" with "0x" when pasting into MetaMask and "0x" with "xdc" when sharing externally. Since the 2.0 upgrade, node software defaults to 0x with xdc as an option, so you will see both. The two forms are the same address; only the first three or two characters differ. Never change anything after the prefix. OneKey's help page puts it plainly: "Only replace the prefix, do not modify any subsequent characters, otherwise your assets will not arrive." Some exchanges only accept one form on their withdrawal screen, so if an address is rejected, try swapping the prefix before anything else. ^[2][11][45]

2. Native XDC versus ERC-20 or wrapped XDC. The 2018 XDCE token on Ethereum was a temporary proxy, swapped 1:1 for native XDC after the 2019 mainnet launch and then retired. If you see an "XDC" token on Ethereum or another chain today, it is either a bridged representation (project materials mention LayerZero OFT transfers) or something unrelated, and sending it to an XDC mainnet address will not credit you. When an exchange or wallet lists XDC, confirm it means the native coin on chain ID 50. ^[14][41][2]

3. Choose the XDC Network on withdrawal. XDC withdrawal screens on exchanges typically offer one network, XDC Network (sometimes labelled XinFin or XDC Mainnet). Never pick Ethereum, BNB Chain or any other network for a native XDC withdrawal, and never send XDC to an address that only exists on another chain. The same applies to USDC: USDC on XDC is a distinct deployment at contract 0xfA2958CB79b0491CC627c1557F441eF849Ca8eb1, and moving it to another chain requires Circle's CCTP or an exchange, not a plain transfer. Network selection errors are usually irreversible. ^[2][28][29]

4. No minimum reserve, but a gas floor. Unlike Stellar or XRP, an XDC account needs no minimum balance to exist. Keep a little XDC for gas, though; the docs recommend at least 0.25 Gwei and warn that a transaction with a lower gas price may get stuck. Staking directly requires 10,000,000 XDC and KYC, so any "staking" offer well below that is a third-party pool or an exchange product, with its own custody risk. ^[2][4]

15. Sources

16. Live chart

The chart below shows the live XDC price; everything above it was checked at the time of writing.