Back to collectionXai Is Announced; Questions Follow the Unveiling
Background: Two and a half years of planning, negotiations, and coding were about to be compressed into one press release. Today: Before dawn, the group received a cryptic preview: the server had changed, bigger news was coming, and members should explore the new layout. Impact and next steps: The release said nothing about a token, yet the group immediately asked whether the Ex Populus token had been dropped in favor of XAI.
A creative chronicle combining project history with imagined scenes. Story events are not verification of network activity.
Background: Two and a half years of planning, negotiations, and coding were about to be compressed into one press release. Until then, the community had seen only fragments of the preparations. Longtime members such as the Night Watchman waited to learn what the new name meant, while A-Zhen waited to see whether the technology and the games would be explained clearly.
Today: Before dawn, the group received a cryptic preview: the server had changed, bigger news was coming, and members should explore the new layout. Veterans looked around and found only that the sections and icons had all changed. That afternoon the official release revealed the name Xai: a Layer 3 chain for game developers, built on Arbitrum technology and led by the Xai Foundation. Offchain Labs was providing technical support and services; in its own statement, it said it was pleased to continue working with the team on infrastructure for game developers. The Xai project was publicly unveiled as the first Layer 3 chain in the Arbitrum ecosystem. About an hour later, a separate message to the old community announced a strategic partnership between Ex Populus and the Xai Foundation, presented the newly announced chain project as the other half of that partnership, and asked members to read and share the news. The project was described as a decentralized game console, aiming for fast transactions, no gas fees for players, and wallets that fade into the background so gameplay would not feel like using a blockchain. Its first two games were the card battler Final Form and the multiplayer competitive game LAMOverse.
Impact and next steps: The release said nothing about a token, yet the group immediately asked whether the Ex Populus token had been dropped in favor of XAI. Another member asked whether “token in October, chain in December” was the timetable. The narrator answered only on deployment: more information would come closer to launch, and that timing was probably right. It was not a full answer about the token. The Night Watchman read the release three times and said, “This time they look like a professional operation.” On the same day, across the ocean, BlackRock filed an application for a spot Bitcoin ETF; no one there connected the two events at the time. The project now had a public name and would have to answer players and developers through its work. Token plans and launch details still needed clarification.