1 · Why put social media on a layer-1 blockchain?
Social networks reach a billion people in a few years; cryptocurrencies take a decade to reach a few hundred million holders. Pixagram borrows the first curve to carry the second.
Because the hard part of a currency is not the cryptography, it is the community. Bitcoin asks a newcomer to buy an abstract asset, secure a wallet and wait. A social network asks nothing of the kind: you post, you vote, you follow a friend. Adoption is measured in afternoons, not years. Average social apps with no internal economy at all reach valuations in the billions; Pixagram starts in the millions of units, with the economy built in from day one.
Putting the network on its own layer-1 chain, instead of renting block space on someone else's, is what makes that economy possible. Every post, vote and comment is a transaction, and a chain that charges a fee per transaction cannot host a feed. The Pixa chain, like HIVE and STEEM before it, settles in about three seconds with no fee, paid for by staked bandwidth rather than gas. Users get a wallet without noticing they got one, and get tokens for every post, vote and comment.
We have seen this work. Steem, launched on the same design, was valued around 1.5 billion dollars about two years after it went live, carried by a blogging community rather than by exchanges. That is why we recommend Pixa as a first step into crypto: the medium is familiar, and the chain stays out of the way.
#layer1 #feeless #adoption
2 · Why choose pixel art as the medium?
A pixel-art piece is small enough to live in a block, and a picture of a scene carries less aggression than a paragraph about it.
Two reasons, one about people and one about bytes.
The human reason: art carries less violence than words for the same scene or idea. A sentence can accuse; a picture of the same moment invites you to look. Gandhi wrote that nonviolence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another, and a feed made of small pictures is closer to that than a feed made of hot takes. We are not naive about it. People can draw cruel things. But the medium changes the default, and defaults are what a social network is.
The technical reason: pixel art is light. A 64×64 artwork with a limited palette is a few hundred bytes to a few kilobytes, which means the artwork itself can be stored on-chain rather than a pointer to a server that may vanish. That is what "artworks lasting forever on the blockchain" means in practice.
And there is an economic consequence that ties the two together. Most blog posts cannot be sold. Art can. A medium that can be owned and resold creates a market, and a market makes money flow between the peers of the economy instead of only from the reward pool outward. Someone who wants to buy an artwork has a reasonable, concrete reason to acquire a handful of tokens, which is exactly the on-ramp Bitcoin never had.
#pixelart #nonviolence #on-chain
3 · What is the Trojan horse?
The feed is the wooden horse. The thing being carried into town is a currency ordinary people hold.
The phrase comes from Dan Larimer's 2016 post on Steemit's plan: a blogging platform that lets anyone earn their way in is a Trojan horse, a way of hiding the vegetables, honest money, inside the food, fun content. The real goal was never the blog. It was bootstrapping a digital currency owned and operated by ordinary people, in three phases: a stable unit people trust, then a marketplace, then smart contracts and side chains built on top.
Pixagram keeps that plan and sharpens the first phase. We make a distinction that is easy to blur: currency and money are not the same thing. A currency enables exchange. Money stores value over time. A dollar is a fine currency and, lately, mediocre money. What Pixagram calls the supra coin is the chain's attempt at the second role: a unit meant to keep your purchasing power over time, so that what you earn for an artwork this year still buys an artwork next year.
A store of value that cannot move is a museum piece, so the supra coin also has to work as currency. On the Pixa chain a transfer settles in zero to three seconds with no fee. That makes it ready for any use case a payment needs, from tipping an artist to paying a supplier, without the user ever reading the word "gas".
#supra #store-of-value #3-seconds
4 · When does transparency serve freedom, and when does privacy?
What happened is public; who you are and what you can sign is yours. The pivot is the person, not the platform.
Larimer's answer, in the second post linked below, is radical transparency. His argument runs: knowledge is power, governments already know nearly everything about us, and asking them to stop is asking them to act against their interest. The aikido move is to make everything transparent, so that nobody holds an information advantage and communities can police themselves without violence. Secrecy, he adds, is a high-energy state that needs constant defence; transparency is a low-energy state that is cheap to sustain.
We agree with the direction and disagree with the word "radical". A blockchain is transparent about actions: every transfer, vote and post on the Pixa chain is public and permanent, and that is what makes the reward pool, the treasuries and the marketplace auditable by anyone with a block explorer. That transparency is freedom in the civic sense: no hidden algorithm, no hidden take rate, no hidden moderation queue.
But freedom in the personal sense needs a door that closes. Your keys are private by construction. Your identity is a handle you chose, not a passport scan. Nothing forces an artist in a difficult country to attach a legal name to a drawing. The line we draw is simple: transparency for what the system does, privacy for who the person is. The first keeps power honest; the second keeps people safe enough to use it.
#transparency #privacy #freedom
5 · Who decides what you see?
A predictive feed narrows the world to what you already agree with. Pixagram's tabs are rules you can read.
The third post linked below, written on Steem in 2017, describes the trap plainly. Predictive algorithms sell us three things: having to do less, reassurance, and comfort. In exchange we are locked into a single view of reality, and when reality finally arrives, as it did for many people on an election night, we cannot make sense of it. The author's remedy is perspective: to understand the shape of the world you have to walk around it.
Pixagram's answer is structural rather than moral. The feed has no hidden model of you. The tabs are Newer, Hottest, Trending and Promoted, and each is a formula anyone can compute from public votes and timestamps. You can disagree with the formula; you cannot be surprised by it. Portals group work by theme, hashtags are chosen by the author, and the people whose votes rank your artwork are visible, with their stake, on the block explorer.
Pixel art helps here too. A square of pixels does not pattern-match to a political tribe the way a headline does, so there is less for an optimiser to optimise, and less reason to build one.
#algorithms #open-ranking #portals
6 · What does the 2027 marketplace fix?
Steem and Hive mint rewards that mostly leave. A marketplace gives tokens a reason to come back.
The economic weakness of Steem and Hive was never the chain. It was that the reward pool paid authors in freshly minted tokens, and the natural next step for an author was to sell them. Value flowed one way: from inflation to the exchange. Nothing inside the network gave a holder a reason to spend tokens on another member.
Larimer's phase two was a marketplace, and it never shipped on Steem. Pixagram's NFT marketplace, due in 2027, is that phase. Artworks are listed, bought and resold in the chain's own tokens; artists earn from sales and secondary royalties, not only from votes; collectors acquire tokens because there is something specific to buy. The reward pool still seeds the economy, but the marketplace closes the loop so that tokens circulate between peers instead of leaking out.
This is also why the supra coin matters for artists specifically. A sale priced in a unit that holds its value is a sale you can plan around. A sale priced in a token that halves between listing and payout is a lottery.
#marketplace #2027 #royalties
7 · Why fork HIVE and STEEM instead of starting from scratch?
A new chain with an old engine. The consensus has run in production for a decade; what is new is what runs on it.
Because the engine already works and the interesting problems are elsewhere. Steem shipped delegated proof of stake with three-second blocks, bandwidth-based fee-less transactions, built-in content and voting primitives and an on-chain reward pool in 2016. Hive forked it in 2020 and kept it running under community control. That is ten years of production time on the exact design a social network needs, and no amount of new tooling buys that.
Forking lets us spend our effort on what the design lacked: a medium that can be stored and sold (pixel art), a unit that keeps value (the supra coin), the marketplace that was promised and never built, and an interface that does not look like 2016. Pixagram is a dark gallery with rounded squares and almost no colour, so that the artwork carries all of it. It lives in its epoch.
Most innovation in crypto over the last few years has gone nowhere a normal person can follow. We would rather be boring under the hood and new where people can see it.
#hive #steem #dpos
8 · Who is Pixagram for, and how do you start?
No wallet setup, no exchange account. Draw, post, get tokens for every post, vote and comment.
For artists who want their work to outlive the platform that hosts it. For collectors who would rather own a small, finished thing than a screenshot. For anyone who has wanted to understand crypto and bounced off the first wallet tutorial. And for people who miss what social media felt like before it was optimised.
Getting started is the point of the whole design: create an account at pixagram.com, post an artwork, vote on a few others. You will receive tokens for every post, vote and comment without configuring anything. If you want to look under the hood, every block is on pixablocks.org, and the developer documentation is at pixa.org. Questions go to the community Telegram, which doubles as the app's help channel.
Take the first step with a pencil, not a seed phrase.
#getting-started #pixa #artists
Pixagram is more peaceful than Mastodon, Steem or Hive because it focuses on art, but it is also polished: it lives in its epoch and looks new despite all the innovation in the crypto space not really going anywhere. It solves the economic model behind Steem and Hive with the marketplace in 2027. Finally, something people can adopt easily compared to Bitcoin.
Sources and further reading
Dan Larimer, Steemit's Evil Plan for Cryptocurrency World Domination (2016), the origin of the Trojan-horse framing and the three phases.
Dan Larimer, Does Freedom Require Radical Transparency or Radical Privacy? (2017).
son-of-satire, How Social Media's Predictive Algorithms Are Perpetuating Division Among the People (2017).
Pixa chain block explorer: pixablocks.org · Developer site: pixa.org · Documentation: github.com/pixagram-blockchain/information
Pixa Rex S.A., Panama (See the blog post on Pixagram.com)