Fifteen Minutes of Sales, Forty-Nine Hours of Silence

The miniature Sentry Keys were about to go on sale. Existing holders had just received their split keys, while new buyers needed to identify the right payment route and understand the referral rules. The Night Watchman had bought his first key early and had long since become a node operator. The narrator was watching to see whether sales and the token price would move together.

Sales opened at 6 p.m. Pacific time on December 13, or 10 a.m. in Hong Kong on December 14. An hour beforehand, every chat room, language room, and Telegram group became read-only for a planned forty-nine hours. Scammers were most active during sales, so officials chose to suspend discussion to reduce fake links. The announcement pinned the contract address and repeated three times that keys were sold only on the official site and that no team member would send private messages. A report ninety minutes after opening said all 14,500 keys in tier 18 had sold in the first fifteen minutes; 35,931 keys in tier 19 had sold, and the per-key price had risen from its starting point to 0.01645 ETH. The bank-card channel had failed, however, so officials advised buyers to use on-chain ETH, XAI, or esXAI for now. The Night Watchman did not rush to buy: he had awakened to a hundredfold increase in the keys in his wallet. He wrote in the group that last year he had queued for his first key, whereas this year ninety-nine more had arrived while he slept. He still could not decide which experience felt more like a decentralized chain. That same day XAI fell below 0.30. The excitement of selling more than fifty thousand keys in just over ninety minutes did nothing to lift the token price.

The narrator set the two paths side by side: the price of keys was climbing while the token was falling. Expectations that had seemed connected were pulling apart. More keys in his wallet had not resolved the Night Watchman's question. While the rooms remained read-only, buyers facing a bank-card failure or referral problem had to rely on announcements and find another payment method. Once discussion reopened, the community would still have to ask whether the new keys' value lay in their use, their rewards, or the brief rush to buy.