Where blockchain meets pixel art.
A practical onboarding guide for users, creators, developers, and anyone curious about a Web 3.0 social media network built on a HIVE/STEEM fork.
Pixagram SA · Chamerstrasse 174 · 6300 Zug · Switzerland · CHE-299.606.603
- What is Pixa? What is Pixagram?
- Why this exists — the three problems with NFTs today
- How Pixa solves them — full on-chain pixel art
- The Steem → Hive → Pixa lineage
- Quick start — your first 10 minutes on Pixagram
- The three tokens: PXA, PXP, PXS
- Earning on Pixagram — posts, votes, curation, sales
- Hashtags vs. Portals — categories and communities
- The Pixagram toolchain — AI, downscaler, upscaler, vault
- For developers — APIs, SDKs, and the chain
- Governance — witnesses, the DPF, and how to participate
- Security — keys, the vault, and good habits
- FAQ
- Glossary
Two things, often mentioned in the same breath, but they are not the same thing.
Pixa is a public blockchain. It is a fork of HIVE, which is itself a fork of STEEM. It is the engine: a Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) network with three-second blocks, twenty-one elected witnesses, and a built-in social-media reward model that pays creators and curators directly out of protocol inflation.
What makes Pixa different from its parents is the storage strategy. On most NFT chains, the blockchain stores only a hash of the artwork — a tiny fingerprint — and the artwork itself lives somewhere else (IPFS, a private server, an Amazon bucket). If that 'somewhere else' goes away, the NFT becomes a hash pointing at nothing. On Pixa, the entire image is stored on-chain, encoded as base64 PNG or lossless WebP. Pixel art compresses well enough to make this affordable; a 192×192 portrait fits comfortably under 20 KB.
Pixagram SA is a Swiss company (Zug, CHE-299.606.603) that develops everything while Pixa Rex SA is a Panamanian company who operate the official front-end. When you open pixagram.com in a browser, you are using Pixagram's interface to talk to the Pixa blockchain — exactly as you might use Hive.blog or PeakD to talk to HIVE.
Pixagram SA is the company with the intellectual property, it is not the chain. Anyone is free to build their own front-end, run their own node, or fork the protocol. The chain belongs to the network of witnesses elected by token holders.
In one sentence: Pixa is the chain that stores the pixel art. Pixagram is the social network that lets you create, share, vote on, and trade it.
Between 40 and 50 percent of internet users worldwide know what an NFT is. Almost none of them have minted one. The pitch deck calls out three reasons; this guide unpacks them.
A standard NFT proves ownership using a SHA-256 hash anchored on a blockchain. But the hash is not the artwork — it is a number that, in principle, identifies the artwork. The actual JPEG or PNG lives on a separate storage layer. If that storage layer is centralized (a private server) it can be shut off. If it is IPFS, the file persists only as long as somebody is paying to pin it. NFT collectors have, over the past five years, watched their 'permanent' assets quietly evaporate when an issuer abandoned a project.
On OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, the bottom 70 percent of users earn just 13 percent of total resale profits. Translation: a small group of insiders captures most of the value, and most participants are losers in a zero-sum scramble for attention. The model selects for hype, not craft.
Minting an NFT means installing a wallet, buying a small amount of a volatile cryptocurrency to pay for gas, finding a marketplace, signing transactions, paying gas again, and praying you didn't approve the wrong contract. For the curious newcomer, the friction is enough to kill the experiment before it starts.
- Unsecure → the artwork is stored on-chain alongside the proof, so the chain itself is the storage.
- Worthless → the platform is built around small, frequent rewards for posting, voting, and curating; not just speculative resale.
- Difficult → no gas fees (bandwidth-based rate-limiting instead), and the front-end abstracts away wallet management for newcomers.
Storing a full-resolution photograph on-chain is impractical — a single 4K image runs into megabytes, and at three-second block times that consumes a meaningful fraction of network capacity. Pixel art, by contrast, is naturally compact. A 128×128 pixel-art with a 32-color palette compresses to ~5 kilobytes. The deck makes the comparison plainly: a 2 MB photograph becomes less than 20 KB pixel-art image after conversion. That is roughly 100× lighter.
This is not a compromise; it is the design choice. Pixel art is the medium that fits the constraint, and the constraint (on-chain storage) is what guarantees the artwork survives as long as the chain does.
- You start with an image. A photograph, an AI generation, a hand-drawn piece, anything you have rights to publish.
- The Pixagram front-end runs it through a downscaler — a Kopf-Lischinski or K-centroid algorithm that reduces the image to a small grid of indexed colors.
- You can edit the result in the in-browser pixel editor: change colors, adjust the palette, refine details.
- The final image is encoded as a base64 PNG or lossless WebP, embedded in the post payload, and broadcast to the chain.
- Witnesses include the post in a block. From that moment, the artwork is part of the blockchain's permanent record.
| Item | Typical size | On-chain? |
|---|---|---|
| Original photo (HD) | 1.5 – 3 MB | No |
| Pixel-art conversion (128×128) | ~5 KB | Yes — embedded in the post |
| Pixel-art conversion (256×256) | ~20 KB | Yes — embedded in the post |
| Maximum post payload | 128 KB | Hard chain limit (raised from HIVE's 64 KB) |
| Block time | 3 seconds | Inherited from HIVE/STEEM |
The on-chain image is the canonical pixel art. Pixagram's front-end can render it as raw pixels, smoothed, hexagonal, or with a CRT-scanline effect — but those are display choices, not changes to the stored asset. WASM and WebGL handle the upscaling client-side; the chain never stores anything but the original pixels.
Pixa did not appear from nothing. It is the latest in a line of three blockchains, each forked from the last.
STEEM launched in 2016 as the first blockchain explicitly designed for social media. By 2017–2018 it was a top-30 project by market capitalization, sometimes ranking just behind Ethereum. Its core innovation was paying users in token rewards for posting and curating content — a model that anticipated, by years, what mainstream platforms only later attempted with creator funds.
In early 2020 STEEM was the subject of a contentious takeover attempt. Much of the original community responded by forking the chain and starting fresh as HIVE. HIVE preserved STEEM's social mechanics, refined the tokenomics, and became the reference implementation of the family.
In 2025, Pixagram forked HIVE to create PIXA. The motivation was different from HIVE's: not to escape a takeover, but to build a chain optimized for storing pixel art on-chain, with the social-reward model intact. Most of the protocol code is the same; the differences are concentrated in storage limits, reward curves, and the addition of a third-token oracle reference.
| Parameter | HIVE | Pixa |
|---|---|---|
| Address prefix | STM | PIX |
| Native (liquid) token | HIVE | PIXA (PXA) |
| Vested governance token | HP | PIXA POWER (PXP) |
| Supracoin / oracle token | HBD | PIXA SUPRA (PXS) |
| Treasury account | hive.fund |
pixa.omnibus |
| Max transaction size | 64 KB | 128 KB |
| Block interval | 3 s | 3 s (unchanged) |
| Witnesses per round | 21 | 21 (unchanged) |
| Reward curves | linear | convergent linear (author + curation) |
| Curation / author split | 50 / 50 | 40 / 60 |
The convergent-linear reward curve is the single biggest economic change. Pure linear rewards tend to concentrate payouts on whoever has the largest stake; convergent linear flattens the top of the curve so that medium-sized contributors are not crowded out by whales. The 40/60 split between curators and authors slightly favours authors — which is appropriate when the platform is asking creators to do the harder work.
If you only read one section of this guide, read this one. It assumes nothing — no wallet, no crypto experience, no prior exposure to Hive.
Go to pixagram.com and choose 'Sign up'. You will be asked for a username (this becomes your @handle on the network) and a strong master password. The platform derives every key it needs from this single password using BIP39-style entropy. There is no email confirmation loop and no KYC for the basic tier.
⚠️ ImportantWrite the master password down somewhere offline. Store it the way you would store the keys to a safety deposit box. The Pixa chain has no 'forgot password' button — if you lose the master password, the account is gone, and any tokens it holds are gone with it. The vault feature inside the Pixagram front-end can help, but it is not a replacement for a written backup.
New accounts arrive with a small starter allocation of PIXA POWER (PXP) — enough bandwidth to make your first posts, comments, and votes. If you blow through it, you can request a top-up through the front-end, or buy PXA on a supported exchange and 'power it up' to PXP.
- Click the camera icon (Create) in the bottom-right of the feed.
- Drop in a photograph. Any reasonable resolution works; the converter will do its job.
- The AI converter offers two modes: Artwork (SDXL with a custom LoRA, gives a stylized painterly look) and Direct Pixelate (downscaler only, faithful to the original).
- Pick a target resolution — 128×128 for portraits and avatars up to 256×256 for scenes with more detail.
- Pick a palette size — 16 colors for retro to 64 for modern pixel art.
- Optional: open the in-browser editor and tweak individual pixels, swap colors, fix the eyes (always fix the eyes).
Add a title, a few hashtags (these are Pixa's category system — see Section 8), choose whether to allow downvotes and comments, and broadcast. The post is signed locally, sent to a witness node, and within three seconds it is part of the chain. From that moment it can be voted on, curated, and — if you choose to list it — sold.
Voting is how you both reward other creators and earn curation rewards yourself. Find a post in the Created or Hot feed, click the up-arrow, and you have just voted. The earlier you vote on a post that ends up doing well, the larger your share of the curation pot. Voting costs a tiny amount of voting power, which regenerates over time — so vote on what you genuinely like, not on everything.
Convert → Post → Vote → Earn.
Repeat for as long as you find it interesting. There are no transaction fees, no gas budgets, no MetaMask popups. The entire economy is paid out of the protocol's inflation, and bandwidth is rationed by stake instead of by money.
Pixa has three economic tokens. They serve different purposes and have very different rules. Confusing them is the most common mistake newcomers make.
PXA is the unit of account. It is freely transferable, listable on independent exchanges, and what you receive when somebody buys your NFT or when you complete a power-down. PXA does not exist at chain genesis — it emerges over time, as PXP holders unstake and as the protocol pays out content, curation, and witness rewards from inflation.
PXP is your stake in the network. You can think of it as a long-term commitment: PXP cannot be transferred between ordinary accounts (with one narrow exception, see below), and converting PXP back into liquid PXA takes thirteen weeks via the standard Hive-style power-down schedule.
What does PXP get you? Three things.
- Bandwidth. Posting, commenting, voting, transferring — every action costs a small amount of bandwidth, which regenerates continuously. The more PXP you hold, the more bandwidth you have. There are no per-action fees in PXA or PXS.
- Voting weight. When you upvote a post, the size of the reward you direct (and the curation reward you earn) scales with your PXP.
- Witness votes. PXP is what you cast for the 21 elected witnesses who produce blocks and ratify protocol upgrades.
The narrow exception
Two genesis-issuance accounts —
@pixa.rexand@pixa.team— carry a protocol-level send derogation that lets them transfer PXP (technically VESTS) directly to other accounts. This is how the company sells utility tokens and pays team grants without ever creating new tokens after block zero. No other account on the chain has this power.
PXS is the most novel of the three. Its design is borrowed from HIVE's HBD (Hive-Backed Dollars) but with one critical change: instead of being referenced to the US dollar, it is referenced to the US Big Mac index, sourced from The Economist.
PXS is not a stablecoin. It is not pegged. It is not backed by reserves. The witness committee publishes an hourly feed — 'one Big Mac costs X PXA today' — and the protocol uses the median of the last 3.5 days of feeds for internal arithmetic. The market price of PXS floats freely on whatever venues choose to list it.
Why bother with a Big Mac index? Because it is a publicly observable purchasing-power signal that does not depend on any central bank. A PXS roughly tracks 'the price of a US Big Mac' over time — which is a more meaningful unit than any single fiat currency for an international, internet-native audience.
| Property | PXA | PXP | PXS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transferable? | Yes | No (except @pixa.rex / @pixa.team) |
Yes |
| Created at genesis? | No — emerges over time | Yes — 100 M units total | Seed of 250,000 at genesis |
| Reference unit | Self | Self (1 PXP ≡ 1 PXA) | ≈ 1 US Big Mac (≈ USD 6.12) |
| Used for | Trading, payments, sales | Voting, bandwidth, governance | Treasury, denomination, savings |
| Exit path | Direct sale on exchange | Power-down: 13 weeks → PXA | PXS → PXA conversion: 3.5 d delay |
At chain genesis there is exactly 100 million PXP and approximately 250,000 PXS. There is no PXA. Over time, PXP holders power-down and create PXA. The protocol pays out content rewards split 50/50 between PXP (vested) and PXS (liquid supracoin). Witnesses earn PXP. The decentralized treasury — funded by ongoing inflation — accumulates PXS, which can be spent only via on-chain proposals.
If this sounds like the Steem/Hive model with new names, that is exactly what it is. The economic playbook has been running on STEEM and HIVE since 2016 without major incident, and Pixa preserves it deliberately.
There are four ways to earn on Pixagram. They compound: a serious user does all four, in roughly increasing order of effort.
Every account regenerates voting power continuously — at full power, you can cast roughly ten meaningful votes per day before regen has to catch up. When you vote on a post that ends up earning rewards, you take a slice of the curation pot, and your slice is larger if you voted earlier (within the first thirty minutes; before that, the protocol penalizes the voter to discourage front-running). The curation pot is 40 percent of the post's payout, with the remaining 60 percent going to the author.
Comments are first-class content on Pixa: they can be voted on, and they earn rewards from the same pool as posts. A thoughtful comment on a popular post can out-earn a low-effort original post. New users often discover this by accident.
Original posts are the main earning surface. Author rewards are paid out seven days after the post is published, in a 50/50 mix of PXP and PXS — so you receive both vested governance stake and liquid supracoin. Author rewards scale with the rshares directed at the post, which scale with the PXP-weighted votes it receives.
What gets rewarded? Pixel art, primarily. But the platform is broader than that — long-form posts in 'portals' (see Section 8) can earn the same way. The convergent-linear reward curve means that posting consistently at a moderate quality tends to out-earn posting one viral hit and disappearing.
Every post on Pixa is implicitly an NFT — the artwork is on-chain, ownership is recorded, and the original creator can list it for sale at any price. The marketplace lives inside the Pixagram front-end. When somebody buys, the PXA flows to the seller's account; if there is a configured creator royalty, a percentage continues to flow on every secondary sale.
Unlike on most NFT marketplaces, listing is free — there is no gas, no listing fee, no smart-contract approval ritual. The chain handles ownership transfer natively.
Hypothetical: a portrait gets twenty votes
You convert a photo into a 128×128 pixel-art portrait, post it, and tag it
#portrait #ai. Twenty users with varying PXP balances upvote it over the seven-day reward window. At payout, the post earns roughly the equivalent of 12 PXA (a typical figure for a moderately-voted post on a chain at this stage of growth).The author (you) receives 60% — about 7.2 PXA equivalent — split between PXP (vesting) and PXS (liquid). The first dozen voters share the remaining 4.8 PXA-equivalent in curation rewards, weighted by stake and timing. If the post then sells as an NFT for 50 PXA, you receive the full 50 PXA (minus any royalty you yourself set, which would only apply to future resales).
The numbers above are illustrative, not a guarantee. Actual rewards depend on the size of the protocol's reward pool at the moment of payout, the total rshares competing for it, and the price of PXS in the moving median feed.
Pixagram has two ways of organizing content. They look similar but serve different functions.
Hashtags are open, free-form tags attached to image posts. They serve the same function as the trending sidebar on a traditional social network: a way for users to discover content by theme. Common hashtags include #portrait, #landscape, #ai, #abstract, #animals — but anyone can introduce a new one simply by using it.
There is no moderation overhead on hashtags. They are tags, nothing more. A post with #portrait simply means 'the author thinks this is a portrait'.
Portals are moderated communities. They are equivalent to Reddit's subreddits or Discord's servers: each portal has owners, moderators, posting rules, and a curated feed. A portal can require certain tags, ban others, mute disruptive users within its scope, and curate a homepage.
Portals are particularly suited to long-form blog posts — write-ups about pixel-art technique, retrospectives on a creator's body of work, tutorials, debates about the future of NFTs, or anything that does not fit neatly into 'image with caption'. The image-feed Pixagram is for visual content; portals are for everything else.
If you are posting an image, tag it with hashtags. If you are posting an article or a discussion, post it inside a portal that fits the topic.
Both flow into the same chain and earn from the same reward pool.
Pixagram is more than a feed. It bundles a set of in-browser tools that let you go from raw image to finished, on-chain pixel art without leaving the page. Each tool is documented separately, but a one-paragraph overview of each is useful here.
Built on Stable Diffusion XL with a custom-trained LoRA in a pixel-art style, plus optional ControlNet depth conditioning to preserve the structure of the source image and InstantID-style face preservation for portraits. You upload a photograph or a prompt; the pipeline returns a stylized pixel-art rendering. The model runs server-side; you receive the output ready to refine in the editor.
If you do not want a stylized AI render — if you just want a faithful pixel-art version of a photograph — the downscaler does it directly. Pixagram implements two algorithms: K-centroid clustering for general images, and the Kopf-Lischinski algorithm for cleaner edge handling. Both run client-side in your browser via WASM.
The on-chain image is small. To display it at modern screen resolutions, the front-end runs an upscaler. Four modes are available:
- Smooth — modern bilinear/bicubic interpolation, for users who want a polished look.
- Squared — nearest-neighbour scaling, preserves the hard pixel edges. The classic look.
- Hexagonal — renders each pixel as a hexagon. Pleasant for organic subjects.
- CRT — adds scanlines and a subtle vignette. Nostalgia mode.
All four are pure rendering — they do not change the on-chain image.
Pixagram caches feed data, post drafts, and image previews in your browser using LacertaDB, a custom IndexedDB wrapper. This makes the front-end fast offline and resilient to flaky connections. Your private keys are not in this cache; they are held separately by the vault system.
Master keys never leave your browser unencrypted. The vault uses Argon2id key derivation, post-quantum-resistant primitives where available, and a session-management layer (ephemeral, persistent, or PIN-protected) so you can stay logged in without leaving plaintext keys in localStorage. If you are coming from MetaMask, this is the closest equivalent — except that there are no contract approvals to worry about, because Pixa does not have user-deployed smart contracts.
Account credentials can be exported as a QR code (for quick transfer between devices) or generated from a BIP39-style mnemonic (a 'brain wallet' — twelve to twenty-four words you memorize). Both are convenience features; the master password remains the canonical recovery path.
If you are building on Pixa, the architecture should feel familiar if you have worked with HIVE. Most of the standard HIVE tooling works against Pixa with only configuration changes.
| Layer | Pixa name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Blockchain core (C++) | Pixagram source | The HIVE fork. Witnesses run this; users do not. |
| RPC API | Pixamind | JSON-RPC interface for reading chain state and broadcasting transactions. |
| JavaScript SDK | Dpixa | TypeScript-friendly client library. Comparable to dhive on HIVE. |
| Reference container image | Pixagram image | Production-ready Docker image of a witness node. |
| Front-end client (React) | Pixagram | The reference web app. Open-source; you can host your own. |
| Local DB | LacertaDB | Custom IndexedDB wrapper for client-side caching. |
| Serializer | TurboSerial | High-performance JS serialization for the local DB. |
A minimal example using Dpixa to fetch the latest blocks:
import { Client } from '@pixagram/dpixa';
const client = new Client(['https://api.pixagram.com']);
const props = await client.database.getDynamicGlobalProperties();
console.log('head block:', props.head_block_number);
// fetch a recent post
const post = await client.database.call('get_content', ['username', 'permlink']);
console.log(post.title, post.body.length, 'bytes');Posts on Pixa are standard Hive-style comment operations. The image lives in the body field, base64-encoded inside a data URI:
await client.broadcast.comment({
parent_author: '',
parent_permlink: 'portrait', // hashtag
author: 'your-username',
permlink: 'first-portrait-' + Date.now(),
title: 'My first pixel-art portrait',
body: '',
json_metadata: JSON.stringify({
tags: ['portrait', 'ai', 'firstpost'],
app: 'pixagram/1.0',
image: ['data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KG...'],
}),
}, postingKey);The chain configuration and the Pixagram client are both open. The two relevant issue trackers are:
- Chain config: github.com/pixagram-blockchain/alphanet/issues/3
- Front-end: github.com/pixagram-blockchain/pixagram/issues/5
Pull requests for protocol changes go through the witness review process; pull requests for the front-end are merged at the company's discretion (Pixagram SA maintains the reference client, but anyone is free to fork).
HIVE library compatibility
Dhive, Beem, and Hive-JS work against Pixa with only the chain ID and address prefix changed. If you have existing HIVE tooling, point it at a Pixa RPC node, set the prefix to
PIXand the chain ID to the Pixa value, and most of it will run unchanged. The 128 KB transaction size limit (raised from HIVE's 64 KB) is the one constraint that can affect existing code paths that assume small payloads.
Pixa is governed in two ways. Witnesses produce blocks and ratify protocol upgrades. The Decentralized Pixa Fund (DPF) funds work through on-chain proposals voted on by stakeholders.
Twenty-one witnesses produce blocks per round, in shuffled order, on three-second intervals. They are elected continuously by PXP holders via stake-weighted approval voting. Anyone can propose themselves as a witness; the top twenty (plus one rotating backup) form the active set.
Witnesses do three jobs: produce blocks, publish the PXS price feed (the median Big Mac index in PXA), and signal support for protocol upgrades. A protocol change ships only when seventeen of twenty-one witnesses run the new code — a supermajority designed to make unilateral change effectively impossible.
Pixa Rex S.A. — the Panama subsidiary that performs the genesis event — operates exactly one witness slot under the account @pixagram, equal to about 4.76% of block production. The other twenty slots are held by independent operators.
The DPF is a treasury account (@pixa.omnibus) that receives 15% of all protocol inflation. It accumulates in PXS — purchasing-power-indexed, not in a volatile token — so that funded work can be priced predictably.
Anyone can submit a proposal. The flow:
- Draft a proposal: a description, a budget in PXS per day, a duration, and a payout account.
- Pay the listing fee (10 PXS, plus 1 PXS per day if the proposal runs longer than 60 days).
- Stakeholders cast approval votes weighted by their PXP holdings.
- Proposals ranked by approval; funded down the list until the daily budget is exhausted.
- Funded proposals receive their daily payout for as long as they remain above the funding threshold.
This is the same mechanism HIVE uses for its own treasury proposals (the DHF). It is well-tested, has funded years of HIVE development, and avoids the centralization risk of a discretionary grant program.
- Vote on witnesses you trust. The 'Witnesses' tab in the front-end shows the active set, their feed publication record, and their software versions.
- Vote on proposals you support. Approval votes are free; you can vote for as many proposals as you like.
- Run a witness. If you have the technical chops to operate a node reliably and the credibility to attract votes, this is one of the higher-leverage ways to contribute.
- Submit a proposal. If you want to be paid to build something for the network — a new front-end, an explorer, an analytics tool — write a proposal and ask the community to fund it.
Custody on Pixa is self-custody. There is no recovery email, no support team that can reset your password, and no smart-contract upgrade that can change the rules of your account. This is a feature — but it makes a few habits non-negotiable.
Each Pixa account has four keys, derived from your master password:
| Key | Used for | If compromised… |
|---|---|---|
| Posting | Posting, voting, commenting | Attacker can post and vote as you. Annoying. |
| Active | Transfers, market actions, witness votes | Attacker can drain liquid PXA and PXS. Serious. |
| Owner | Recovery, key changes | Attacker can take over the account permanently. Critical. |
| Memo | Encrypted memo encryption/decryption | Attacker can read your private memos. Mildly bad. |
The Pixagram front-end uses the posting key for ordinary social activity, prompts for the active key only when you initiate a transfer, and reserves the owner key for sensitive operations. It never stores the owner key in the browser cache.
Three rules
- Write the master password down on paper and store it somewhere safe.
- Never paste the master password into a website that is not
pixagram.io. Bookmark the real URL and use the bookmark.- Never share the master password with anyone, ever. No support agent, no team member, no friend will ever ask for it.
The vault is a feature inside the Pixagram front-end that encrypts your derived keys with a session PIN and stores them in your browser's secure storage. It uses Argon2id for the key-derivation step and post-quantum-resistant primitives for the long-term encryption. With the vault enabled, you only need to type the PIN to start a session — the master password stays in cold storage.
The vault is convenience, not custody. If your laptop is lost or stolen and the attacker also has your PIN, they can drain the keys it holds. Treat it accordingly: short timeouts, separate device for large balances.
On a chain with no smart-contract approvals, the realistic attack surface is phishing. Fake Pixagram clones that look identical to the real site, served from misspelled domains, asking for your master password. Defenses are simple but you have to actually do them: bookmark the real URL, never click 'sign in' links from emails or DMs, and treat any prompt for your master password as suspicious — the real site asks for it once, on first login.
Yes. There is no signup fee, no posting fee, no transaction fee, and no marketplace listing fee. The protocol uses bandwidth-based rate-limiting (the more PXP you hold, the more bandwidth you have) instead of per-action fees. New accounts arrive with enough starter bandwidth to begin posting immediately.
No, but a few hours of casual reading will help. The front-end abstracts most of the wallet management. If you can use Instagram, you can use Pixagram. If you want to actually understand what is happening underneath — keys, witnesses, reward curves — sections 6, 11, and 12 of this guide are where to start.
The protocol is borderless and open. There is no entity that can geo-block access at the chain level. Some exchanges that list PXA may impose their own jurisdictional restrictions; that is between you and them. The Pixagram front-end is operated by a Panamanian company and follows its law.
The 2021 NFT bubble is dead. The use case — provable, transferable digital ownership of original creative work — is not. The deck's framing (unsecure, worthless, difficult) is honest about why the bubble deflated. Pixa's bet is that fixing those three issues, and pairing the result with a working social-reward economy, makes the underlying technology useful again. Whether that bet is right is for the next few years to decide.
Pixa the chain does not 'make money' — it is a public protocol owned by no single entity. Pixa Rex SA, the Panamanian operator, monetizes through its operational and sales account (@pixa.rex), through its witness slot, and through future commercial services (premium tiers, enterprise integrations). The protocol itself simply runs.
The chain continues. The reference front-end is open source; anyone can host it if they are authorized to do so. The remaining twenty witnesses keep producing blocks. Your account, your PXP, and all the on-chain artwork are unaffected. This is the structural advantage of being on a public chain rather than on a centrally-operated platform.
The Token Genesis Event specification — the document that defines what the chain is at block zero, including all genesis parameters, allocations, and the legal framing of the three tokens — is available internally and on request. The pitch deck is the high-level summary. For the bytes-level definition, the source code on the github.com/pixagram-blockchain organization is the canonical reference.
- Bandwidth — Per-account rate-limit budget for chain operations. Regenerates over time. Scales with PXP.
- BIP39 — A standard for representing a private key as a sequence of memorable words (a 'mnemonic').
- Block — A batch of transactions, produced every 3 seconds by the current witness.
- Convergent linear — The reward curve used by Pixa for content payouts. Mid-stake contributors are not crowded out by whales.
- DPF — Decentralized Pixa Fund — the on-chain treasury, funded by 15% of inflation, spent via stakeholder-voted proposals.
- DPoS — Delegated Proof-of-Stake. Token holders vote for witnesses; witnesses produce blocks.
- Hashtag — Open category tag on image posts (e.g.
#portrait,#abstract). No moderation. - Initminer — Bootstrap witness account at chain genesis. Disabled shortly after launch in favour of
@pixagram. - Kopf-Lischinski — An algorithm for downscaling raster images into clean pixel art.
- Master password — The single secret from which all four account keys are derived. Cannot be recovered if lost.
- NFT — Non-Fungible Token — a unique on-chain record of ownership. On Pixa, the artwork is part of the record.
- Portal — Moderated community for blog-style posts. Equivalent to a subreddit.
- Power-down — The 13-week process of converting PXP back to liquid PXA. Paid out in 13 weekly installments.
- Power-up — Staking liquid PXA into PXP. Instant; reverses via power-down.
- PXA — Pixa — the liquid native token. Transferable, listable on exchanges.
- PXP — Pixa Power — the vested governance and bandwidth token. Mostly non-transferable.
- PXS — Pixa Supra — the supracoin, oracle-referenced to the US Big Mac index.
- Reward pool — The protocol-managed pot from which content and curation rewards are paid. Filled by inflation.
- RPC — Remote Procedure Call — the JSON-based API used by clients to talk to a witness node.
- Rshares — Internal accounting unit for vote weight. Determines a post's share of the reward pool at payout.
- SDXL — Stable Diffusion XL — the AI model used for the Artwork conversion mode. Customized with a pixel-art LoRA.
- Supracoin — An oracle-referenced token whose internal accounting tracks a non-currency reference unit. PXS uses the Big Mac index.
- Vault — The Pixagram front-end's encrypted local key store. Convenience, not custody.
- VESTS — The protocol-level unit of stake. PXP is the human-readable display projection of VESTS.
- Witness — One of 21 elected node operators who produce blocks, publish price feeds, and signal protocol upgrades.
That's the lay of the land.
Make pixels. Stake your stake. Ship things.
Pixagram SA · Chamerstrasse 174 · 6300 Zug · Switzerland CHE-299.606.603 · pixagram.io · [email protected]
Inherit eternity, shape infinity.