The Pools Open a Dispute Over Who Gets the Rewards

Less than 24 hours after the pools opened, operators began comparing the rewards they actually received. The pools placed key holders and esXAI stakers under one distribution system, turning the unresolved question of reward shares into an argument in the node group.

One operator laid out the arithmetic: before staking, 100 percent of emissions went to people running nodes. Now pools chasing the diamond tier were willing to give half to esXAI stakers to attract them, and his reward per occasion had fallen from roughly 110 or 120 to 80. Another operator called it a transfer of node rewards to esXAI stakers dressed up as staking. Others countered that total daily emissions had not changed, only their distribution; for a small holder with a few keys, pools paid more than version one. One member recounted the earliest version, version one, its patch, and version two: the earliest favored key holders most, version one was poor, the patch less so, and version two was acceptable despite its flaws, especially since staking had long been on the roadmap. He then said he was done debating it.

The team confined its response to mechanics: each key had a default one percent chance of being selected for a challenge, and a pool's multiplier applied to every key in it. It also described pools as becoming a 'black hole' of community coordination and pointed to the three leading pools for people to examine themselves. On the forum, one pool owner promised equal treatment for key and esXAI stakers and no change to their split without a community majority vote. The Night Watchman stayed out of the fight. Later, he said that moving from randomness to cooperation also moved the power to distribute rewards, which could not please everyone at once. Participants still had to test pool owners' promises against actual distributions.