How it works

GERO is a randomness oracle on X1 whose entropy comes from physical radioactive decay measured by Geiger counters run by independent node operators. Every 8 slots it produces one line: one random result, verified on-chain, that consumers such as Forge Launch use for NFT mints.

The GERO White Paper v0.1 (PDF) describes the oracle in full: how results are built, the two versions, nodes, and its security limits.

For every line each node commits to a hidden seed ahead of time and reveals it in a short window after the line's bound slot; a reveal inside the window is on time. The seeds are combined into the line's result, which a prover proves and a separate on-chain verifier checks. A line with no reveal at all is dead.

GERO writes one on-chain record per line, in a ring of 32,768 lines (about 26.8 hours): which nodes were on time, whether the line had requests, and whether a proof was verified and by which prover. Its header names each node's payout address.

X1 Mainnet runs GERO v8.1, the live oracle. X1 Testnet runs the next version, with the line record, together with the ENTROPY minter and its test token tENTROPY, which has no value.

ENTROPY is the token that pays for GERO's work. It is mined, not pre-minted: a separate minter program reads the line record and credits each line's reward to the nodes that were on time, to the prover whose proof was verified, and to an ecosystem vault. Nobody holds a mint key, and the minter becomes immutable before trading opens. ENTROPY is not launched on mainnet; it is in testing on X1 Testnet.

The supply is capped at 21,000,000 ENTROPY. 10% (2,100,000) is minted once as genesis liquidity and paired with 2,000 XNT on Forge Swap. The other 90% (18,900,000) is mined on a schedule that halves every 16,089,796 lines, about 18 months at the measured X1 slot time. Halvings count lines, not time, and are published as line numbers. The first era pays 0.587328764 ENTROPY per line.

There is no team, investor, treasury or airdrop allocation and no vesting schedule.

A line is paid once it is 64 lines old and can no longer change. Anyone can run the settlement, which credits each payee's claimable balance. Each payee opens its own claim account once and can then claim at any time; tokens are minted only to that payee's own token account. On testnet this happens on the Claim page.

Planned uses include paying GERO request fees and letting creators prepay the oracle's share of Forge Launch mints. Both keep working in XNT, so nobody has to hold ENTROPY to use GERO.

The ecosystem vault's 10% funds projects that use GERO randomness, under spending limits, with larger payments going through a 7-day public proposal and every withdrawal recorded on-chain.

ENTROPY carries no share of any revenue, pays nothing for holding, and is not staked.

Nodes are approved by GERO's governance key, held on a hardware wallet. Approval starts a 7-day shadow period: the node commits and reveals on the real network but affects no result, sets no bits in the line record, is not slashable and earns nothing. After that it can be activated.

Each node has a hot node key in its daemon and a cold owner key that is never on the node machine. Only the owner key can change the node's payout address, and only after a 72-hour public delay, so a stolen hot key can cause misses but cannot redirect anything. On mainnet every payout address must be a cold wallet that can connect to a browser, separate from the node key.

Nodes post a bond in XNT, never in ENTROPY. A node that misses its reveal window is slashable and earns nothing for that line. The current values are a stake of 10 XNT and a slash of 1 XNT per missed line.

See the Nodes page for every node and what it takes to run one.