Thanks to the PixelChain team for publishing this article with us!

What is PixelChain?

PixelChain is a decentralized app that allows any person to create 32×32 pixel art on-chain. It’s the first project in the crypto industry that enables collectors, artists, and users to easily create pixel artwork, and save 100% of the image’s information on the blockchain without depending on servers or IPFS.

Every image generated is encoded into an ERC-721 token that contains the artwork’s name, the codified pixels, the color palette, and the creator’s wallet ID. Pixelchain uses an open-source decoder built exclusively for the project. It also has a friendly UI that allows any user to create pixel art without requiring any previous technical knowledge. (Get access to the decoder here).

Pixelchain is a side project developed entirely by the CryptoMotors team. We’ve been working on this project for the last 7 months, and we’re super excited to bring it to you.

First, we’d like to give a huge thanks first to the great artist that use our platform, we are so happy that all of you can create and transact using PixelChain. Between artists, collectors, and casual users, we’ve had an incredible first month.

In this time, over 2,100 PXC NFT’s have been minted, exceeding 110 ETH sold on Opensea. As we continue to push forward and bring exciting new features to our dAPP, we hope that more artists and collectors realize the value of on-chain NFT’s. Today, over 330 unique address’s hold one PXC or more. In the coming weeks, we hope to double or triple this number.

There’s something about the simplicity of being limited to 16 colors and a 32×32 grid that pushes creativity to new areas. Users have been describing the creation process as lots of fun but still challenging. Knowing these limitations, collectors are finding value in PXC because they also have played around in the editor and know how tough it is to create a masterpiece. When people first see an artwork they love on PixelChain, they often think “wow, that must have taken a long time”. It’s easy to see the thinking behind “Time + Aesthetics = Value”.

Why On-chain pixels?

We believe NFTs are an incredible technology for proving digital ownership, scarcity, and interoperability. But what would happen if your favorite NFT project shut down? Having the metadata and artwork stored off-chain will not grant that this will be available forever.

These were enough reasons to make us think about a solution to this problem. Storing the artwork and the metadata completely on-chain, without depending on external services, makes the NFTs truly immutable, with an eternal life span.

How does it work?

PixelChain is a pixel image editor and a minting platform. OpenSea is the default marketplace to trade PXCs once minted. PixelChain’s browser image editor is developed in react and it is connected through web3 to our ethereum smart contract to serve as a minting platform.

PCX’s NFTs are composed of 4 main on-chain metadata; The Artwork Title, Artist wallet address, Pixel bytes data, and Color palette. We have developed and made open source a decoder that is used to decodify the Pixel bytes data into a human-readable image. Pixelchains can also be decoded into a 32x32x1 voxel file ready to use in CryptoVoxels.

Once again, we thank you for making the launch such a successful one, we look forward to bringing you much more enjoyment with our dApp through many new features.