Welcome to Pixa, Hive's sibling chain

primerz(61)

Published in

HiveDevs

Words

553

Reading

3 min

Listen

Play

Hi HiveDevs 👋

Some of us have been building on Steem and then Hive since 2016. Today we'd like to introduce a sibling chain: Pixa, the blockchain behind Pixagram.com, a social network for pixel art.

Pixa is a fork of hived. It runs 1.29.0, built on upstream hived 1.28.7, and its genesis block was on 4 September 2026. If you can build on Hive, you can already build on Pixa. The APIs, operations and tooling are the same. Only a few things were renamed or retuned.

What stays the same

DPoS consensus, with 3-second blocks and up to 21 elected witnesses
Resource credits, so posting is free
The usual APIs: condenser_api, database_api, bridge, follow_api and tags_api
The same backend stack: HAF, Hivemind, Jussi and cli_wallet
The HF21 reward curves (convergent_linear for authors, convergent_square_root for curators)
A proposal fund that works exactly like Hive's DHF

What's different

	Hive	Pixa
Liquid token	HIVE	PIXA
Stable unit	HBD (pegged to USD)	PXS, worth one Big Mac by convention
Staked token	VESTS	VESTS
Key prefix	`STM`	`PIX`
Chain ID	`beeab0de00…`	`706978616772616d00…` ("pixagram")
Max transaction size	64 KiB	128 KiB
`custom_json` payload	8 KiB	64 KiB
Interest on the stable unit	set by witnesses	locked at 0 in consensus
Vesting reward share	15%	0%
Inflation split (content / proposal fund / witnesses / vesting)	65 / 10 / 10 / 15	70 / 15 / 15 / 0
Curation share	50%	40%
Proposal fund	DHF, `hive.fund`	DPF, `pixa.omnibus` (no keys)

Why the changes? On Pixagram, the images themselves are stored on-chain as base64 PNG, WebP or SVG, not as links. That's why the transaction and custom_json limits are doubled or larger.

The monetary policy is also deliberate: there is zero passive yield. Holding PIXA or PXS earns nothing. Only producing blocks, posting and curating do.

Porting your Hive code

Endpoints: api.pixagram.com, merlion.surf, blockforge.lol, pixarex.net, boitata.quest and pixa-dubai.xyz. All six serve the same Hive-compatible JSON-RPC, with CORS open.
Client library: use @pixagram/dpixa. It's our chain client for Node and the browser, and Hive's dhive users will find it familiar. You can also keep your current library if you set the chain ID and the PIX prefix.
Asset symbols: send PIXA and PXS in legacy asset strings. NAI-format assets work as they are.
Field names: the public endpoints return pxs_balance, reward_pixa and similar names instead of the hbd_* and *_hive fields.
No testnet: pixagram.dev is the app's canary build, and anything you broadcast through it is real.

bash

curl -s -X POST https://api.pixagram.com -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"condenser_api.get_version","params":[],"id":1}'

About the genesis stake

The question every Hive dev will ask first is who holds the stake. Pixa started with no liquid PIXA. All 100M VESTS at genesis went to two accounts:

pixa.rex received 75M
pixa.team received 25M

Both accounts are 3-of-3 multisig, and consensus code welds them shut. They cannot vote on content, vote for witnesses, set a proxy, post or broadcast custom_json. The only thing either account can do with its funds is transfer VESTS to another account. We designed it this way after what happened to Steem.

Run a witness

Nine witnesses are in the schedule today, so the field is wide open.

Witness: 2 vCPU, 4 GB of RAM and 50 GB of disk, set up with one Docker Compose file.
Full API node: 4 vCPU, 16 GB of RAM and 100 GB of disk.
Guide: https://pixa.org/witness.html