Back to collectionAn All-Time Low, While the Chain Keeps Running
The linear unlock of the investors’ allocation had just ended, and the Riftstorm demo was temporarily offline for maintenance. In the thin bids before dawn, a few sell orders pushed XAI to $0.006651, its lowest price in more than 900 days of trading and 99.6% below its $1.60 high on 2024-03-11. The narrator remembered the garage decision to build a chain, the spike on Binance’s opening night, airdrop recipients seeing their paper gains double in a week, the $1.60 peak, delayed games and a public separation from the chain, and the 10·10 liquidation.
A creative chronicle combining project history with imagined scenes. Story events are not verification of network activity.
The linear unlock of the investors’ allocation had just ended, and the Riftstorm demo was temporarily offline for maintenance. No new market news followed. The Night Watchman, a longtime community member on watch, A-Zhen, the engineer responsible for backend work, and the narrator faced the same question: how far could the price fall before anyone noticed?
In the thin bids before dawn, a few sell orders pushed XAI to $0.006651, its lowest price in more than 900 days of trading and 99.6% below its $1.60 high on 2024-03-11. Market capitalization was about USD 14 million, its rank had slipped below 800, and no industry outlet reported the low that day. Two and a half years earlier, XAI had appeared on Binance’s front page, opened in six trading pairs at once, and carried dreams of a valuation in the billions of dollars. Now it took more than a dozen pages of scrolling through a market app to find it. Yet the chain kept producing blocks, Sentry draws continued, Raijin kept issuing tasks, and the more than 51,000 holder addresses were still slowly increasing. The Night Watchman’s laptop ran on the balcony as usual. Asked how he felt, he said the chain had not existed when he joined in 2021; now it was here, and so was he. He had said he would neither sell in the bull market nor leave in the bear market, and he meant it. Before leaving work, A-Zhen sent one line to the internal group: the backend had not lost a single transaction today.
The narrator remembered the garage decision to build a chain, the spike on Binance’s opening night, airdrop recipients seeing their paper gains double in a week, the $1.60 peak, delayed games and a public separation from the chain, and the 10·10 liquidation. More than 900 days later, even an all-time low could not draw a news alert. But beyond the 99.6% lost, 0.4% remained: a working chain and a small group that had stayed. The narrator recorded the price alongside the operating status. Whether the price would stabilize, and when the game would return, remained unanswered. This entry was no farewell.