XYO is the native cryptocurrency of the XYO (XY Oracle) Network, which is a network of devices that anonymously collects and validates geospatial data, or data with a geographical component. It is known as an “oracle,” which in crypto jargon means technology that provides real-world data from an online source to a blockchain protocol or decentralized application.

XYO tokens are Ethereum-based ERC-20 utility tokens that are used to reward contributions to the XYO network ecosystem. In a way, XYO tokens are the “gas” needed to interact with the real-world data and verify the XY-coordinate of a specified object. XYO tokens take into account both miners and users. The XYO token model incentivizes miners to provide data and not to provide data when it's unnecessary. End users are rewarded to conduct more transactions when network liquidity is low.

XYO has a fixed supply of 13.96 billion tokens, all of which were released during a public sale, which means that no more XYO will ever be created. In March 2018, the XYO network held its initial token offering, using a tiered structure to pricing the tokens between 100,000 XYO per 1 ETH and 33,333 XYO per 1 ETH. Any tokens remaining from the token sale that weren’t allocated or purchased were burnt (destroyed) by the network.

XYO began trading in May 2018 at around $0.00552, but progressively fell down to its all-time low of $0.00009607 March 2020 following the departure of XYO co-founder and Vice Chairman Scott Scheper and a broader market downturn due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In September 2021, XYO reached a new high of $0.04636, gaining 207% following simultaneous listings on the Coinbase and Gate.io exchanges. Two months and several other exchange listings later, XYO surged to its all-time high of $0.08203 in November 2021, nearly breaking into the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap after reaching a major milestone of 3 million nodes and being a listed on Crypto.com.

The XYO Network is an open-source network of geographical data that is used to answer questions related to an object’s or person’s location. To do that, the network uses what is known as “proof of origin.” According to the project’s white paper, a proof of origin blockchain is capable of confirming a location through the collection, confirmation and storage based on “bound witness” interactions. Bound witness interactions occur when two devices that aren’t related or connected each detect one another and report that they saw each other; each one proves that they both really were in the same place at the same time.

Bound witness interactions occur among “sentinels,” or data gathers, in the XYO Network. Sentinels are physical devices like a smartphone that broadcasts a signal about its location, time, or temperature to attempt to create a bound witness interaction with another device. When a sentinel broadcasts its signal, the signal is received by a data-relaying “bridge.”

Like sentinels, bridges are physical devices like a smartphone that participate in the XYO Network. A bridge must look for bound witness interactions and sign them to confirm that the interaction happened. The confirmed transactions are then sent to “archivists,” or data stores. Archivists are responsible for holding all confirmed bound witness interactions confirmed by bridges and retrieving the data when necessary.

The final party of the XYO network system are “diviners,” or the answer aggregators of the network. Diviners are nodes on the XYO Network that answer questions using the bound witness data. The questions are usually asked by an individual or computer program querying whether something, or someone, was at a certain location at a certain time. Diviners are able to ask the questions to the archivist or go directly to a bridge for the data needed to answer the question.

In exchange for their participation on XYO’s network, sentinels, bridges, archivists and diviners all receive XYO tokens as a reward. Sentinels and bridges are rewarded XYO tokens when their information is used to answer a question. Archivists are rewarded for the retrieval and use of data, although they aren’t rewarded merely for data storage. Finally, diviners receive XYO tokens as payment from parties looking to query data from the XYO Network.

The XYO Network was co-founded by Scheper, Arie Trouw and Markus Levin in 2017 while they were developing products for the geolocation startup XY Labs. XY Labs continues to develop products for the XYO Network, including its geospatial technologies and applications.

The XYO Network is maintained by the XYO Foundation, which was established as a nonprofit in March 2020 to facilitate education, research and continued development of the XYO protocol. Since the project’s launch, the XYO Foundation has helped form partnerships for the XYO blockchain, including ones with Chainlink (LINK), Remax, Deon Digital, Mobi and Microsoft. XYO also acquired LayerOne at the end of 2018 to gain the project’s locational data-storage protocol, Quadhash.

The XYO Network went live in December 2018 in tandem with its partnership with Spaceflight which planned to use XYO’s technology to communicate the position of satellites.

In June 2021, Trouw, one of the co-founders, announced major upcoming changes for the XYO 2.0 upgrade, outlined in the XYO network’s road map.