Welcome to Pixa: Hive's younger sibling, where the picture lives in the block
Hello, photographers of Hive, and welcome to Pixa: a younger sibling of this chain, built for one job Hive was never designed to do. It keeps the picture itself inside the block.
Hive knows forks better than most chains; it was born from one in March 2020. So let me be plain: Pixa forks Hive's software, not its chain, its accounts or its balances. It isn't an official Hive project; it's family, running the same engine for a different job.
Where your photos actually live
When you publish on Hive, your words go into a block and stay there. Your photos don't: they're uploaded to an image host, and the post carries a link. For a 20-megapixel file that's the right design, because no block could hold it.
The cost is that each picture lasts only as long as someone keeps that server running. Scroll far enough back through old posts and you'll meet the grey box where a photo used to be.
Pixa makes the opposite trade-off. Its transactions can be twice as large as Hive's, up to 128 KiB, so the image itself fits inside the post. It's stored as base64 PNG, WebP or SVG: no link, no image host, nothing to expire.
The catch: 128 KiB won't hold your full-resolution work. It holds pixel art, about a hundred times lighter than a photo; a typical 2 MB photo comes out at around 19 KB. That's why Pixa is a pixel-art network, and why it starts with photographers: you already own the best raw material.
What will feel familiar
If you know Hive, you already know most of Pixa. Pixa is the chain, like Hive; Pixagram (pixagram.com) is the app, like PeakD or Ecency. Pixa's six public API nodes are open to anyone, so nothing stops someone from building another app on the same chain.
Same engine. Pixa runs a fork of hived: blocks every three seconds, signed by up to 21 witnesses elected by stake-weighted vote.
Proof-of-Brain. Authors and curators are paid from the chain's inflation, and votes are weighted by staked tokens.
Free posting. Resource credits recharge on their own; you never pay a fee to publish.
A chronological feed. Following someone is delivery, not a ranking signal: you get every post they make. That's why we call Pixagram the anti-social media network: it refuses to farm you.
The keys you're used to. A posting key can post, vote and follow but can't move funds; the active key handles transfers.
A community fund. Hive has the DHF; Pixa has the DPF, spent only through proposals that stakeholders vote on.
The three tokens map one to one:
| On Hive | On Pixa | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| HIVE | PIXA | The liquid token; most rewards are paid in it |
| Hive Power | PIXA Power | Staked PIXA; weights your votes, including witness and proposal votes |
| HBD | PXS (Pixa Supra) | Worth one Big Mac by convention |
What's different
Holding earns nothing. Pixa sets both of Hive's passive-yield levers to zero: no interest on the stable unit, no payout for simply holding staked tokens. Rewards go only to people who post, curate or produce blocks. If HBD savings are your favourite part of Hive, Pixa will disappoint you, and that's deliberate.
The stable unit is a Big Mac. PXS is worth one Big Mac by convention. Witnesses publish its price feed every hour from the US price in The Economist's Big Mac index, which the magazine has run since 1986. It isn't a stablecoin claiming a reserve; it's a unit of account anyone can check at a counter.
A fresh start: new names, new keys. Pixa began from its own genesis block on 4 September 2026, and no Hive accounts or balances came with it. Your Hive name isn't reserved there: usernames are first-come and can't be reassigned. Pixagram creates new keys on your device (public keys start with PIX instead of STM), encrypted behind a PIN, and never needs your Hive keys.
The founding treasuries never vote. The team and company allocations sit in restricted accounts that cast no votes: not for witnesses, not on proposals, not on posts. Hive was born from a fight over stake and witness votes, so this felt like the first rule to get right.
Copies are caught before minting. The app compares each new artwork with what's already on-chain, using perceptual hashing, and catches duplicates before they're minted. It can only check against what's there, so the best protection for your work is your own version, posted first.
Why we're starting with photographers
Pixel art is a hard composition test. Shrink a photograph to a small grid and a handful of colours, and the detail falls away; what survives is light, shape and balance. Strong photographs make strong pixel art, which is why this community is the first we wanted to invite.
Pixagram turns any photo into pixel art in three clicks, free. For portraits there's also an AI converter built on SDXL with InstantID face preservation: a photo with a face becomes 4K pixel art that still looks like the person. Nothing you upload to it is stored.
What I won't promise
I won't tell you where PIXA will trade, that you'll earn a lot, or that your work will sell. Pixa is a month old, nine of its 21 witness seats are filled (live status), and the feed is still young. That cuts both ways: fewer readers than Hive for now, and far more say in what the place becomes.
What I can promise is the plumbing. The picture is in the block, posting is free, and the code is open source at github.com/pixagram-blockchain. The chain is public too, so you don't have to take my word for how any of it works.
Start in a few minutes
Open pixagram.com and claim a username. Pixagram offers 250 free accounts a day, and names go to whoever asks first.
Turn one of your photos into pixel art and keep the version you like.
Post it. Three seconds later it's in a block.
Vote for three artists. Curation is rewarded here too, as on Hive.
Add Pixagram to your phone's home screen from the browser. It's a web app, so there's no app store in between.
If you run a Hive witness, most of what you know carries over. A Pixa witness is two containers on a small server (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 50 GB disk), and the witness guide goes from an empty machine to block production one command at a time. Developers will find the libraries, node guides and API endpoints at pixa.org.
Not goodbye, Hive
Keep posting your photographs here. Hive is where full-resolution work belongs, and communities like this one are a big reason the Steem and Hive family has lasted ten years. Pixa is for the version of your picture that's small enough to live inside a block.
Same family, different job. See you in both feeds.
— Matias (
P.S. I posted it (again) within my blog and in tags because the first post was muted because I posted it into the wrong community.