The Next Steps
Hey all, Luke here.
There’s been a lot of new faces that have popped up in the last two weeks. First of all, welcome!
We started Pixels 1 year ago, and we’ve been discussing the idea of a sustainable token ecosystem for ages. We are excited about the future of web3 gaming, but previous projects have exposed critical issues in the space. We want to clarify a few things to manage expectations appropriately.
What We’re Building
Pixels wants to help people come together online. We believe that community is built in two ways
- Common experiences
- Common Goals
Games! Games are the best way to bring people together, and we can augment community building to another level by adding the benefits of web3.
We aim to be the first game that brings the benefits of web3 to a massive casual audience. The benefits are…
- Ownership of in-game assets leads to higher loyalty and connection
- Incentives with tokens allow for rewarding healthy behavior in our ecosystem
- Interoperability of in-game purchases leads to richer game experiences
Web3 will change gaming. We’re incredibly early to the party. At Pixels, we kind of get to be mad scientists — we’re going to try many things. Only some things will work — but we are a team that builds incredibly quickly, is highly passionate, and will respond as gracefully as we can at every turn. We are making the foundation for an ecosystem that will last for years and years.
What We’re Not Building
We are not making the next Axie Infinity; we aim to create a new paradigm and a new playbook for other games in the space to follow.
We are not creating the future of work. We are a game, and we want to avoid creating scenarios where people are playing our game full-time as a form of work.
We’re not building a get-rich-quick scheme. We’re not making a pump-and-dump, and we’re not creating a Ponzi scheme.
The team is putting in an incredible amount of work to become real difference makers in this space and to do that we need to start a dialogue with everyone reading this, our community.
Our Play-to-Airdrop
At the end of August, we announced a play-to-airdrop. We’ve seen incredible interest in this program and are incredibly grateful to everyone joining us in this exciting experiment.
There are three types of personas we wish to reward in this experience.
- Players
- Land Owners
- Sharers
Each persona is equally valuable to our ecosystem, and we aim to reward and incentivize behavior in each of them.
As each of these three personas interacts with our ecosystem, they have the opportunity to earn points.
Players can earn points by
- Playing our game
- Becoming a top player of our game
- Completing Quests
- Owning Land
- Holding land
- Sharing the game with others
Airdrop Points Breakdown
Out of all points rewarded, we aim to hit these splits:
- 40% of all points will be given to players
- 40% of all points will be given to our landowners
- 20% of all points will be given to our sharers
We’re close to hitting this point organically. In the top 10 of our leaderboard, you’ll see all three of these users. We have players who don’t own any land or have any referrals at the top, a user who shared with their entire audience, and land owners who have held since mint.
Token Sustainability & Vesting
We love web3 because of incentive alignment. We want to encourage behavior that leads to a healthy and long-lasting ecosystem.
What kind of behavior is not healthy?
- Buying and flipping our land in a short time frame
- Dumping our tokens instead of using them in-game
- Holding tokens but never playing our game
We’re building an ecosystem that will be around forever, and we’re looking to find players who want to be with us for the long haul.
To help align incentives, we’ve announced that all tokens will vest & need in-game actions to claim fully.
This allows us to…
- Properly balance our game before introducing too many new tokens into our in-game economy
- Filter for users who want to be a part of our ecosystem
- Avoid a large dump in our tokens
This may upset some users. But if this upset you, you might be the type of user we are trying to filter out.
Vesting & Lockups
Both of our tokens will have a lockup, a vesting period, and requirements to fully unlock the vest attached to them.
Depending on how you earn your tokens, your vesting requirements will change. We intend for these requirements to be manageable, but we need you to participate in our game and ecosystem to unlock all rewards fully.
A lockup is a short period where tokens are not accessible. We are working with a partner to put these lockups on chain. After lockup ends, tokens are distributed on a scheduled cadence throughout the vesting period.
When the tokens are released — they will be shown on a claim page.
We’re partnering with www.magna.so to facilitate these vesting and claim logistics.
Unlocking
To fully claim tokens, you may need to participate in some in-game behavior. This allows us to ensure the tokens are being distributed to ‘good’ holders in our ecosystem who will continue to help us grow and build.
Depending on how your tokens were earned in the initial pre-alpha, the requirements for unlocking these tokens will be different.
Claiming Points Earned from Land
One thing that provides this ecosystem zero value would be to purchase land before the snapshot and sell it immediately after, and we will not reward that behavior.
Passive Staking
We’ve been tracking the on-chain activity of holders of our land NFT. We’ve been awarding points to landowners for every single day they’ve held since the minting of our NFT.
Incentive to Hold
We want to reward users who stay in our ecosystem for the long term. To fully unlock points from land ownership, you’ll need to hold a similar amount of land at each vesting stage.
- Your points earned holding daily holding will not need the accompanying land to unlock.
If you hold one of our land NFTs at the time of claim, a 10% boost will be added to the number of tokens you can claim.
In-game Unlocks
We’ll likely ask you to log in to fully claim the tokens and run through the initial setup of your land.
In Summary
- Keep holding, and this process simplifies.
- Upon each vesting cycle, you’ll need the same number of lands to unlock the vest fully.
- You’ll unlock a portion of the vest in proportion to the land you hold otherwise.
- You can access all points accrued from holding daily, no matter the number of lands you currently hold.
- Holding just one land will boost the number of tokens you can claim by 10%. This bonus does not stack.
Claiming Points Earned from Play
Players have been earning airdrop points for Pixels for the last nine months just by playing our game. We are super appreciative of everyone who has been playing — we hope you had fun!
To fully unlock your tokens, points earned from playing must be unlocked by….
- Completing certain quests
- Hitting certain in-game milestones
We want these milestones to be manageable. We want to ensure you’re checking out our game at least a little! If you don’t like our game, you don’t need to stick around, but the ecosystem is better for everyone, the more engaged users we have.
The Purge
It’s no secret that the web3 space has a botting problem. A recent study found that up to 40% of users in the web3 gaming space could be bots.
After our play-to-airdrop ends on October 31st, we will spend about a week analyzing data and marking all suspected accounts as bots.
You’ll have one week to appeal if you’ve been marked as a bot by mistake. At the end of the week, all suspected accounts that have not been through appeals will be removed from our play-to-airdrop list, and points will be recalculated.
Claim Dashboards
After we finish purging bots, we’ll turn on your claim dashboards.
To claim your tokens, you’ll get a new menu on the airdrop dashboard page! You’ll be able to see exactly how many tokens you have waiting when they’ll unlock, when they will vest, and what you’ll need to do to unlock the tokens fully.
Vesting Schedules
$BERRY
Berry will lock for one month and vest over three months. This schedule should show up on your dashboard on November 9.
$PIXEL
The facilitation of Pixel will happen shortly after $BERRY. You will still be able to see your point total in the meantime. More details on this are coming very soon…
Just the Beginning
We intend to scale Pixels as large as we can. We believe we can onboard hundreds of millions of gamers into web3, and we can’t wait to bring all of you along for the ride.
