Back to collectionThe October 10 Liquidation: XAI Pierces $0.0099
The node channel was quiet that morning. Panic struck US stock futures first, then spilled into crypto. Through that night of market paralysis, the chain kept producing blocks.
A creative chronicle combining project history with imagined scenes. Story events are not verification of network activity.
The node channel was quiet that morning. A holder asked whether a Sentry Key could be sold, and an operator pointed him to a related proposal in the ecosystem proposals section. A few hours later, panic triggered by tariff news swept through the markets. Nobody had time to discuss the proposal anymore.
Panic struck US stock futures first, then spilled into crypto. Leveraged positions fell in succession; the marketwide liquidation total jumped to a new order of magnitude by the hour. Major coins suffered plunges of nearly half their value, while altcoins briefly lost usable quotes. XAI opened at $0.0406. Market makers pulled orders en masse, the buy side thinned abruptly, and the price touched $0.00987, down 76% from the open, before recovering to close at $0.0263. In one day it went from about four cents to below one cent and back to roughly 2.6 cents. For many leveraged longs, ordinary stop orders and margin offered no timely protection. The narrator saw a gap of dozens of percentage points between the best bid and the latest trade; market sell orders seemed to fall through empty space. For those minutes, the order book could scarcely establish a price.
Through that night of market paralysis, the chain kept producing blocks. The Night Watchman's Sentry node continued watching the network, participating in challenges, checking assertions, and claiming rewards. He wrote in the group: “The chain never stopped for a second. What stopped was people's nerve.” In the early hours of October 10, 2025, Sisyphus placed market sell orders for his entire position, held since the 2024 airdrop, then left the group without saying goodbye. Nobody knows his exit price. The narrator recalled the upward spike to $2.5 on January 9, 2024; the downward spike to about $0.0099 on October 10, 2025 came 21 months later. The roughly 99.4% decline instead compares the $0.00987 low with the March 11, 2024 Binance reference high of $1.60. The protocol was still running, but holders had to confront liquidity, positions, and trust anew. Whether the market could steady the next day remained open.