The architect is Dan Larimer, a person I know far less than, for instance, Sunny King—the architect of Proof-of-Stake—with whom I was in touch several times. Dan is one of those geniuses in the crypto space who remains among the most discreet, yet possesses a brilliant mind, just as Sunny King does. They both own a great wealth, yet they have been highly undervalued for what they brought to the cryptographic domain.
Let us forget Sunny King for a while; this article shall focus on Dan Larimer. Yet both have influenced my perception of reality—and the reality itself as well.
Besides making me think of Lester Crest, in appearance and tenacity (I bet you will find out without too much effort—they look pretty much the same), I do not know if it is a bad or good news, but that is suddenly obviously not fake news nevertheless. It is neither new nor fake.
What strikes me about Dan's work is not merely his technical genius—anyone can write code—but his ability to see the matrix of human coordination problems that blockchain was meant to solve. Reading through his old Steemit posts is like discovering the blueprints to a cathedral that was never quite completed. The vision was there. The architecture was sound. The execution, however, remained fragmentary.
In 2016, Dan Larimer published a piece titled "Steemit's Evil Plan for Cryptocurrency World Domination," a document that reads today less like a manifesto and more like a prophecy that awaited its prophet. He outlined three phases:
Bootstrap a Stable Currency — The Steem Dollar, different from other digital currencies because you are not trusting anyone else to hold real dollars in the bank. Backed by the growing community of bloggers, not by centralized reserves.
Bootstrap a Marketplace — A successful marketplace needs two things: People and Money. Steemit was attracting hundreds of new users every day and filling their pockets with fresh Steem dollars. The environment was ripe.
Sidechains, Smart Contracts, and SmartCoins — Once you have a highly functional currency, a robust community, and lots of content, you are ready to build robust smart contracts and sidechains. Unlike other smart contract platforms, Steem would have no fees.
"A blogging platform that makes it possible for everyone to earn their way in is just a trojan horse. It is a means of hiding the vegetables (honest money) in the food (fun content)." — Dan Larimer
The vision was elegant: use content creation as the distribution mechanism for a new financial system. Yet here is what Dan wrote that never materialized—the marketplace. The escrow system. The classifieds section with private messaging. He said, "Once we have private messaging we will have a classified tag. Posts made in the classified section will have payouts disabled. Private messages are necessary for exchanging personal information to close the deal. We will add escrow support at the blockchain level."
It never happened. NFTs did not exist then, but Dan was not far from having the perfect plan. He was perhaps too busy—or perhaps the market was not ready. Who knows? He is probably very busy like all of us, all the time.
We are taking this plan. We are making it newer, yet the same—except much higher than we can imagine.
Perhaps Dan's most profound contribution was not technical but philosophical. In his 2016 essay _"Why Every Blockchain Needs a Constitution,"_he articulated something that most of the crypto world still fails to understand: code is not law.
"After 8 years and hundreds of blockchain experiments, one thing is perfectly clear: blockchains do not solve the governance problem. The theory that code is law and the argument that objective math is an incorruptible ruler have both failed in practice." — Dan Larimer
He was right then, and he remains right now. Consider his reasoning:
People are the blockchain. Any and all value held by Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Steem exists solely at the whim of public opinion. Numbers on a ledger have meaning only because humans agree they do.
Immutable code assumes perfect code. Any serious programmer knows non-trivial code is impossible to perfect or guarantee bug-free. Developers still find exploits in security-critical code that is decades old.
Majority rules is not enough. Under a majority rules system there is no guarantee that 51% will not abuse the 49% or that the 99% will not abuse the 1%.
The goal is to avoid forks. The purpose of any governance system is to minimize the likelihood of community division. A fork occurs when an organization splits, and usually both sides lose as the sum of the forks is less than the value of the whole.
Dan argued that a constitution must define values, not laws. Laws are overly specific; two people with different values can agree on the same law for different reasons. But if people come together because of agreement on current laws, there is no guarantee they will agree to changes. Values, on the other hand, allow productive debate that reaches conclusions both parties accept.
"I have been a critic of the United States Constitution because it either authorizes the tyrannical police state we have today, or it is powerless to stop it. Either way, the Constitution of These United States has failed." — Dan Larimer
A blockchain, Dan noted, remedies the failures of traditional constitutions: it is inherently non-violent (changing numbers in a database is never a violent act), it is interpreted by computers (code is unambiguous and reliably evaluated), and laws can be made difficult to change (Bitcoin's governance gridlock proves this point).
Dan's philosophical depth extended beyond blockchain governance. In his essay on "How Social Media's Predictive Algorithms Are Perpetuating Division Among The People," he identified a problem that has only worsened since 2017:
"These algorithms which determine our interests, have in effect become little more than self-perpetuating systems of confirmation bias. We are shown what we like and what we agree with. We are shown what our close friends like and agree with. We are shown other people who like and agree with those same things. Everything else doesn't exist, or at least doesn't matter."
The profundity of his observation lies in this: _"We are united in our individuality. Our difference to one another is the only thing that each and every one of us on this Earth have in common."_Traditional social media destroys this unity by trapping us in ideological ghettos.
This is why Pixagram's approach differs fundamentally. We are not building another algorithmic engagement machine. We are building a platform where the art itself—the pixel creations—transcends ideological boundaries. A well-crafted pixel artwork speaks a universal language. The proof-of-brain consensus rewards quality, not controversy.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Dan Larimer—the architect of billions in blockchain infrastructure—is deeply interested in philosophy and consciousness. In "How to Dodge Bullets - Creating your own Reality," he writes about subjective reality and the law of attraction:
"What I find fascinating about this perspective is that it makes each of us 100% responsible for the world around us. Rather than complaining about someone else we need to view everything we perceive as reality as a reflection of our inner self. Attempting to change other people is like attempting to reach into the mirror. We must change ourselves and then those around us will change. Be the change you want to see in the world."
This is not mere mysticism. It is the foundational attitude of builders. Dan created BitShares, Steem, and EOS because he believed these systems into existence. The technical work was secondary to the vision.
At Pixagram, we carry this torch. We believe pixel art stored permanently on-chain is not merely a technical feature—it is a statement about what deserves to endure. It is a philosophical position: that human creativity, captured in its most elemental form, should outlast empires.
Pixagram is not merely a fork of Steem and Hive. It is the completion of Dan's unfinished plan, elevated to meet the NFT era. Consider what we are building:
Dan created the Steem Dollar, pegged to USD. We have created PixaSupra (PXS), pegged to the Big Mac Index. Why? Because the US dollar is itself a moving target. The Big Mac Index, published by The Economist, measures purchasing power parity across nations. Each witness manually selects their country's Big Mac price, creating a decentralized oracle for real-world economic value.
PixaSupra is backed by a minimum 300% reserve of liquid PIXA tokens, with an aspirational target of 1000%. This is not algorithmic stablecoin wizardry—it is overcollateralization enforced by community consensus.
Dan dreamed of a marketplace but never built it. We are building it—with NFTs at the core. But not just any NFTs. These are pixel artworks stored directly on the blockchain, encoded in Base64 within the post body itself. No IPFS dependencies. No broken links. No rug pulls where the image disappears.
The marketplace implements a 10% fee on initial NFT sales and 2.5% on secondary sales. These fees are paid in PIXA and then burned, reducing total supply. Money flows through the ecosystem like blood through a body—suddenly necessary, constantly circulating, enabling life.
Dan envisioned complex smart contract platforms. We have chosen a different path: Layer-1 native NFT integration. The NFT system is not a sidechain or a smart contract bolted on top—it is built directly into the blockchain protocol. This reduces attack surface, eliminates gas fees for NFT operations, and ensures that NFT functionality survives as long as the chain itself.
Pixagram can handle up to 10,000 transactions per second with blocks every 3 seconds. This is not speculation; this is the Graphene architecture Dan himself designed, optimized for our use case.
Dan wrote that a constitution must be cryptographically signed by every user, that it must be practically immutable, and that it must provide for dispute resolution. We take this further.
Pixagram SA/AG is registered in Zug, Switzerland—Crypto Valley. But the constitution is not Swiss law; it is blockchain law. The constitution must be backed by a foundation structure—potentially Swiss or Panamanian—that is effectively untouchable by any single jurisdiction. This is not about evading regulation; it is about ensuring that no government can unilaterally seize or shut down a global creative community.
Our constitutional principles:
Censorship Resistance & Freedom of Expression: Art should never be restricted or erased by centralized entities.
Financial Liberty & Decentralization: True ownership means no intermediaries controlling access, storage, or monetization.
Technology as a Community Pillar: Great communities are built on great technology.
Opposing Apathy with Art: Instead of empty words, we fight stagnation with meaningful artworks.
Pixel Art as a Form of Meditation: There is peace in simplicity. The constraints of pixel art encourage focus, patience, and deep artistic expression.
The Decentralized Pixa Fund (DPF), receiving 17.5% of inflation rewards, operates on stake-weighted voting. The community itself decides how resources are allocated. No Pixagram executive—including myself—can unilaterally access these funds. Decay is prevented not by central authority but by core DAO principles: anyone can submit proposals, and the community votes with their staked tokens.
Multiple systems continuously ask the community for feedback. Witnesses—the block producers elected by stake-weighted votes—must maintain the PixaFlat peg, but they cannot change the constitutional values. If governance fails, the ultimate safeguard remains: the community can fork. But a well-designed constitution minimizes this necessity by self-selecting for participants with aligned values.
The NFT market has experienced explosive growth—from $380,000 in revenue in 2018 to projected $6.7 billion by 2028. Yet up to 80% of NFTs on platforms like OpenSea are allegedly fake or copies. The market screams for authenticity, permanence, and genuine artistic value.
Pixel art is the perfect medium for blockchain NFTs. Why? Because pixel art is inherently compact—typically 3-30 kB—allowing direct on-chain storage where regular photographs would be impossible. The constraint becomes the feature. Just as Dan's bandwidth limitations shaped Steem's design, blockchain's storage limitations have shaped Pixagram's artistic focus.
We use lossless WebP and PNG encoding—10% lighter than standard PNGs—combined with Base64 encoding for UTF-8 text storage. Every pixel artwork stored on Pixagram will exist as long as the blockchain exists. We forecast millennia. This is not hyperbole; this is engineering for permanence.
Dan Larimer wrote in 2016: "The road is long, but the Steem community will eventually follow the yellow-brick-blockchain to the Emerald City and in the process overcome the wicked witch of the west. The Steemit community just needs to overcome its fears, stop being cowardly, and find it in their heart to love one another. Maybe the plan isn't so evil after all."
The plan was never evil. It was ambitious. It was visionary. It was incomplete.
Pixagram completes it. We carry the fire Dan lit. We build the marketplace he dreamed of. We implement the constitution he articulated. We solve the storage problem he identified. We create the community he believed possible.
By May 2025, we will unveil a pre-alpha social media marketplace alongside the alpha testnet. Users will post content, vote on artwork, and earn rewards. The NFT marketplace follows. Marketing campaigns will attract creators and collectors. Performance optimizations and rendering system improvements will refine the experience.
And through it all, we remember Dan's deeper insight—the one about subjective reality:
"Neo: What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?
Morpheus: No, Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to."
We are ready. The bullets do not exist. Only the vision, and the will to build.
—
Matias Affolter
Co-Founder & CTO, Pixagram SA/AG
Zug, Switzerland
Learn more: pixagram.io| pixa.pics
