Back to collectionStaking Pools Open Beyond Key Holders
For the preceding year, staking XAI had required a Sentry Key: only node key holders could lock coins. The staking pools went live in the afternoon. New participants needed a way to find the rules and ask questions.
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For the preceding year, staking XAI had required a Sentry Key: only node key holders could lock coins. After days of explanations and software updates, pools were ready to open. Ordinary XAI holders wanted to know whether they could participate; operators wanted to know how the new rules would divide rewards.
The staking pools went live in the afternoon. Any XAI holder could now convert XAI to esXAI and deposit it in someone else's pool without first owning a key. Sentry Key holders created pools and had to stake at least one key to open one. This 'genesis key' required a longer wait to retrieve than an ordinary key. Pool owners set the shares for key stakers and esXAI stakers themselves, with the split displayed on each pool's page. Tiers ran from bronze to diamond: higher tiers increased the selection multiplier for every key in the pool. Gold carried a fourfold multiplier, and diamond went higher. Unstaking generally required a seven-day wait.
New participants needed a way to find the rules and ask questions. That day, three wallet-verified identities opened for Sentry Key holders, esXAI holders, and XAI holders, alongside a help area, a discussion area, and a forum where only pool owners could post about their pools. Node software versions 1.1.8 and 1.1.9 also arrived in succession; their notes said they made no operator-facing change and only aligned version numbers with the website. Around 0.88, the price rebounded for just two hours before falling back. Access had widened, but whether the reward splits would satisfy participants and how pools would work in practice remained open questions.