XYO Network

Arie Trouw started the item-finder business in 2012. Company history calls its early product identity Webble, but the SEC filing records the legal entity as Ength Degree LLC. It converted into XY–The Findables Company in 2016, became XY–The Persistent Company in 2018 and took the XY Labs name in 2021. Bluetooth XY Finders, GPS models and XY4+ supplied the hardware experience behind the later network; project material says one million beacons had been produced by 2017.

At the end of 2017, Trouw, Scott Scheper and Markus Levin co-founded the XYO blockchain initiative. The installed devices supplied an intuition and a distribution channel: a location claim becomes more useful when independent devices remember meeting and sign the same encounter. XYO called that record a Bound Witness.

XYO’s 2018 sale materials proposed an Ethereum utility token for querying the location oracle. They projected a USD 48 million sale cap, promised to burn unsold and unallocated tokens, matched each public token with one for the company and pre-generated 3.2 billion for company and team. A later GAMMA pool reserved 5 billion, sold 659,855,226.56 by November 30 and left a large reserve.

The legal line was explicit: XYO was not equity in XY Findables. It mattered because the same business also sold regulated shares. SEC filings later traced the company’s names to XY Labs and described XYO Foundation as a California corporation wholly owned by XY Labs. Open-source stewardship and token participation did not erase the parent company.

XY Labs introduced COIN in 2019, moving participation from specialist hardware toward a phone app. XYO now reports more than 10 million installs and over 5 billion XYO rewarded. Those are project-reported distribution counters, not evidence of 10 million simultaneous independent validators. The company-operated app decides which activities earn its internal points and which accounts may redeem them.

The units and rights remain separate. COIN is an in-app point balance, not equity, a governance vote or an on-chain XYO balance. A user must satisfy the current account, verification, minimum-balance, request-spacing and destination rules before asking the service to deliver XYO; those service rules can change. Redeemed XYO may be delivered to a compatible external wallet or credited to a Coinbase account. The former creates a token balance at the selected on-chain address; the latter is held through Coinbase custody. App points alone are neither balance.

XYO now describes three location-validation modes. Heuristics compare environmental and device signals quickly. Bound Witness uses multiple devices to sign an interaction. Advanced processing revisits historical evidence. Together they make alteration and inconsistency easier to detect than a lone GPS coordinate would.

A cryptographic signature proves that a key approved a message; it does not calibrate the sensor behind the key. Colluding phones can agree on bad input, hardware can be compromised, and validation rules can rank the wrong candidate. Even the newer Proof of Perfect language says it selects the best available version rather than assuming perfection—and its documentation still places formalization and field testing in the future.

In its 2025 semiannual SEC filing, XY Labs reported announcing XYO Layer One and XL1 in April 2025; project docs date mainnet launch to September 2025. The project links the new chain to data volume from its phone-based network. Layer One places selected payload hashes into consensus, uses Bound Witness Trees and limits historical lookback, so raw observations can remain elsewhere while the chain records provenance anchors.

The economic rights split again. Ethereum XYO is staked behind producers and validators and used for security and governance; XL1 pays Layer One gas, contract execution and rewards. The Genesis Era begins with 38 billion XL1 at the genesis block and mints another 10 billion through early blocks, allocating 26.8 billion to community and investors, 10.6 billion to team and advisers and 10.6 billion to the XYO Treasury. Producers choose block contents; validators check compliance and node stake can be slashed. System staking is documented as non-slashable inside the protocol.