The Largest Pool Is Compromised by an Exposed Private Key

Early in the morning, the narrator joined Binance’s livestream for the announced question-and-answer session. The community had expected to keep pressing on games and the approaching halving. By the time the broadcast ended, the node group was focused on the largest staking pool, and the Night Watchman had to consider whether operators could still entrust their keys to it.

The top-ranked pool, full with 750 keys, had been compromised. The cause was quickly identified and confirmed by officials in the node group: instead of using a Sentry wallet to run the node, the pool owner had pasted the private key of the wallet holding the keys directly onto a cloud server. The keys and esXAI were locked in a contract, beyond the attacker’s reach. Yet if neither the owner nor the attacker continued operating the node, the pool would earn no more rewards. Operators advised one another to unstake and move to another pool, and to use delegated addresses in future: authorization could be revoked after an incident, while a private key should never go onto a server. On the same day, officials announced a partnership with Polychain Monsters to bring the DN404 standard to Xai. Even after the app was installed, registration would open only after a 48-hour countdown. The official account also teased, half in jest, that the second half of the year would be interesting for stakers and node operators.

The Night Watchman summed it up: the contract had not failed; a person had. The narrator recorded a harsher image: the chain’s largest delegation had stalled at a copy-and-paste. The limits of the contract’s protection were now clearer, but locked assets did not guarantee continued operation. Affected operators still had to weigh unstaking and changing pools, with no answer yet on when rewards might resume. The DN404 partnership and registration countdown opened another thread on the game side; today’s most urgent choice belonged to the node operators.