Glossary

Each term has one entry. Older names, and names inherited from Steem and Hive, point to the term these pages use. The Style Guide explains why each name was chosen.

Other names you may meet

Terms

Account

An identity on the chain: a name of 3 to 16 characters controlled by four keys. An account is opened either by paying the account creation fee or with a ticket claimed through Resource Credits (limits).

Account recovery

A way to take back an account whose owner key was stolen. The account's recovery partner starts the request. You then complete it with a new owner key and an owner key the account used within the last 30 days. The chain records owner-key history since hardfork 30 (2026-10-07), so only an owner-key change made after that can be undone (details).

Author reward

The part of a post's payout that goes to its author: the 60% left after the curation share, less any beneficiaries. It is paid partly in PXS and partly in Pixa Power, or entirely in Pixa Power if the author chooses.

Beneficiary

An account named in a post to receive part of its author reward. A post can name up to 8.

Big Mac reference

The real-world good the PXS reference points to. It is a direction, not a price PXS promises. Each witness works out how many PIXA buy one Big Mac where it operates, from the local price of a Big Mac in the local currency and the fair value of PIXA on its market, converted at the day's rate, and publishes that figure. No currency is privileged. The chain takes the median (feed rules). On 2026-11-03, seven of the 21 scheduled witnesses still divided by an agreed placeholder price for PIXA instead (Oracle and Price Feed).

Block

A batch of transactions signed by one witness. A new block arrives every 3 seconds.

Block log

The file in which a node keeps every block since genesis: the chain itself. A node rebuilds everything else from it (Run a Node).

Chain ID

A 32-byte value mixed into every signature, so a transaction signed for Pixa is invalid on Hive and the other way round. Pixa's is the ASCII word pixagram, padded with zeros.

Claimed account

A ticket for opening an account, paid with Resource Credits instead of the creation fee. Apps use these tickets to open accounts for new users.

Collateral ratio

The value of all PIXA divided by the value of the PXS held outside the treasury, with both valued at the median feed. The haircut is calculated from it.

Collateralized conversion

Turning PIXA into PXS. You lock twice the value in PIXA and receive the PXS at once, minus a 5% fee. The conversion settles after 3.5 days, and any excess collateral comes back to you. The chain refuses it if PXS would grow past its limit (limits).

Comment

The operation behind every post and reply. A post is a comment with no parent; a reply names its parent. On Pixagram, an artwork is a post whose body is a data URI.

Community

A group of posts with its own moderators, run by Hivemind. Its name is portal- followed by a digit from 1 to 3 and then 4 to 6 more digits, for example portal-100001.

Content constant

A parameter of the reward curves, written s. Pixa sets it to 2,500, far below Hive's, to suit this chain's scale.

Conversion

Turning PXS into PIXA. It settles after 3.5 days at the median feed, reduced by the haircut if one applies.

Curation

Voting on posts. Voters share 40% of each post's reward. Early votes earn more than later votes of equal weight, and the reward falls further for votes cast more than 24 hours, and again more than 72 hours, after the post was published (curve and windows).

custom_json

An operation that carries arbitrary JSON for apps, such as follows, community actions and games. On Pixa it can hold up to 64 KiB.

Data URI

Text of the form data:image/webp;base64,… that contains a whole image. On Pixagram, an artwork post's body is exactly one data URI holding a lossless WebP image, so the image itself is stored in the block.

Debt ratio

The value of the PXS held outside the treasury, as a share of that PXS plus all PIXA. At 20%, new PXS stops being printed. Above 30%, the haircut applies.

Decentralized Pixa Fund (DPF)

The on-chain fund that pays for proposals the community votes for. It is held by the keyless account pixa.omnibus and receives a share of every block's issuance. It is the counterpart of Hive's DHF (how it pays).

Delayed voting

Stake that is powered up, or received from the allocation accounts, counts in witness and proposal votes only after 30 days; rewards count at once. This blocks quick governance takeovers with freshly bought stake.

Delegation

Lending Pixa Power to another account. The borrower gets its weight for voting on posts and its Resource Credits. You keep ownership, and witness and proposal votes still count the stake as yours. When you take a delegation back, the stake reaches you 5 days later.

Downvote

A vote that lowers a post's payout. Downvotes spend a separate pool of mana worth a quarter of your voting mana.

DPoS

Delegated Proof of Stake: a consensus method in which stakeholders elect the block producers. On Pixa these producers are the witnesses.

Dust deduction

A fixed number of rshares that every vote loses: 50,000 since hardfork 30, so that a full-strength vote counts from 2.5 Pixa Power. Until 2026-10-07 it was Hive's 50,000,000, which on Pixa, where a VESTS is worth about one PIXA, silenced every vote below 2,500 Pixa Power (details).

Fair value

The value the price-feed software gives one PIXA from its market's order book: the average of the prices at which 1,000 PIXA could be sold into the bids and bought from the asks, held between the best bid and the best ask. Unlike the last trade, one small order cannot move it (Oracle and Price Feed).

Genesis

The start of the chain: block 0, 2026-09-04 12:00:00 UTC. Pixa began with a new genesis, so no balances were copied from Steem or Hive. See Genesis allocation.

HAF

Hive Application Framework: an indexer that copies the chain into PostgreSQL so apps can query it. Pixa's public API nodes run it.

Haircut

A factor, at most 1, applied when PXS converts to PIXA. It is 1 while the collateral ratio is at least 7 : 3. Below that it falls in proportion, to 3R ÷ 7. Under stress, a PXS settles for less instead of the system defending a number (formula, how it works).

Hardfork

A protocol upgrade. It activates once enough of the scheduled witnesses run the new version and vote for it. Hardforks 29 (2026-09-18) and 30 (2026-10-07) are the two made for Pixa so far (Protocol Upgrades).

Hivemind

The social indexer behind feeds, follows and communities. The bridge.*, follow_api.* and tags_api.* API methods are answered by Hivemind.

Issuance

The new PIXA created in every block. Most goes to the reward fund. The rest goes to the DPF and to the witness that produced the block; none goes to stakers for simply holding (rate and split).

Jussi

The JSON-RPC proxy in front of a public node. On api.pixagram.com it also renames Hive's hbd_* fields to pxs_*.

Keys

Every account has four key pairs, each with a different power:

• Owner can replace the other keys and recover the account. Keep it offline.
• Active moves funds and changes most settings.
• Posting posts, votes and follows. It cannot move funds.
• Memo encrypts private memos.

Public keys start with PIX.

Median feed

The rate the chain uses for conversions: how many PIXA one PXS converts to, before any haircut. It is the median of the last 84 hourly samples, and each sample is the middle value of the witnesses' feeds (rules).

Multisig

An authority that needs several signatures. pixa.rex and pixa.team each need 3 of 3.

NAI

Numeric Asset Identifier, the code each token carries on the wire: PIXA @@000000021, PXS @@000000013, VESTS @@000000037.

Node

A computer running hived, the chain's software. A follower node validates and stores the chain; a witness node also produces blocks; an API node also serves apps (Run a Node).

Payout

Seven days after a post is published, the rewards it has gathered are paid to its author, beneficiaries and curators. A payout below 0.020 PXS is not made.

PIX

The prefix of Pixa public keys, for example PIX6LLegb…. Hive keys start with STM.

PIXA

The liquid token of the Pixa chain, with three decimals. It is the counterpart of HIVE and STEEM.

Pixa chain

The public blockchain Pixagram runs on. It is built from Hive's code with Pixa-specific rules, and started from its own genesis.

Pixa Power (PXP)

PIXA that has been staked, held on chain as VESTS. It gives voting weight, earns curation rewards and supplies Resource Credits. Turning it back into PIXA takes 13 weekly instalments, and holding it earns nothing by itself. It is the counterpart of Hive Power and Steem Power.

Pixa Supra (PXS)

The chain's second unit. PXS promises no price. It has no peg, cannot be redeemed for money, pays no interest, and no one stands behind its value. In one phrase, it is a Big Mac referenced supracoin. It converts into PIXA at the median feed, which references one Big Mac, less the haircut when the network is stretched. It is the counterpart of HBD and SBD (PXS at a Glance).

Pixagram

The social network for pixel art that runs on the Pixa chain (pixagram.com). The name also refers to the project as a whole.

Posting interval

The pause the chain requires between your posts: 5 minutes between top-level posts, and 3 seconds between replies or edits.

Power up, power down

Powering up turns PIXA into Pixa Power at once. Powering down turns it back into PIXA in 13 weekly instalments.

Price feed

A witness's published statement of how many PIXA one PXS references: one Big Mac in the witness's country, divided by PIXA's fair value in the same currency, with bigmac-feed v1.3.0. Witnesses publish about once an hour; feeds older than 7 days are ignored (Oracle and Price Feed).

Print rate

The share of the PXS part of author rewards that is actually paid in PXS. It is 100% while the debt ratio is under 20% and 0 at or above it; when it is 0, those rewards are paid in PIXA instead.

Proof-of-Brain

Paying for contributions according to stake-weighted votes. Authors are rewarded for what they publish, and curators for finding it early. The chain records the votes; people supply the judgement.

Proposal

A request for money from the DPF, with a receiver, a daily amount, start and end dates. It is funded while it has more votes than the return proposal, up to the fund's daily budget.

Proxy

Handing your governance votes to another account. It then votes your stake for witnesses and on DPF proposals, and your own proposal votes are ignored while the proxy is set.

Recent claims

The running total of recent reward claims, which decays over 15 days. Each post's payout is its claim divided by this total, times the reward fund's balance. Hardfork 29 reset it, because the value inherited from Hive had made early payouts too small to pay.

Recovery partner

The account allowed to start a recovery for you.

Replay

Rebuilding a node's state by re-applying every block of its own block log. Needed after a version change or a new indexing plugin.

Resource Credits (RC)

The stake-based allowance that pays for operations instead of fees. Every operation spends credits, bigger transactions spend more, and credits recharge fully in 5 days.

Restricted account

pixa.rex or pixa.team. These two accounts may only move VESTS and update their own keys (rules).

Return proposal

A DPF proposal that pays back to the fund itself, so it sets the bar: only proposals with more votes are paid. On Pixa it is proposal 2.

Reward fund

The pool that pays post rewards. It receives most of each block's issuance.

rshares

Reward shares: the weight of a vote in the reward calculation. It is the mana the vote spends, minus the dust deduction, and reduced further for votes cast in the last 12 hours before payout.

Savings

Balances that can only be withdrawn after a 3-day delay, which gives you time to react if your active key is stolen. Savings earn no interest on Pixa.

Signing key

The key a witness registers on chain and keeps on its server to sign blocks. It is separate from the account's keys. Besides blocks, it can only update the witness's own settings, such as its URL, price feed and parameter votes; it cannot move funds (Become a Witness).

TGE

Token generation event: the creation of the genesis allocation at block 0, on 2026-09-04. The operator, Pixa Rex S.A., initiated it.

Timeshare witness

The 21st slot of a full witness round, which rotates among witnesses that are not in the top 20. It exists only once more than 20 witnesses are active.

Transaction

A signed bundle of operations. It names an expiry up to 24 hours ahead, and a node drops it if it is not included within an hour of reaching that node. It cannot be larger than the current block size limit (size and expiry).

Treasury

See pixa.omnibus.

VESTS

The on-chain unit of Pixa Power, with six decimals. On Pixa, 1 VESTS has stayed worth about 1 PIXA since genesis.

Voting mana

How much voting an account can do. Since hardfork 28, a full-strength vote spends 2% of the full mana bar, however much is left, so 50 such votes empty it. Mana recharges by 20% of the full amount per day.

WebP

The image format used for artworks. The app encodes each artwork as a lossless WebP file and stores it in the post itself as a data URI.

Witness

An elected block producer. Up to 21 are elected, and the chain needs only 1 to run. Witnesses sign blocks in turn, publish the price feed and vote on chain settings such as the account creation fee and block size. Every account can vote for up to 30 of them, weighted by Pixa Power.

Witness schedule

The order in which the elected witnesses take turns producing blocks.

Accounts and organisations

pixa.omnibus

The keyless treasury account of the Decentralized Pixa Fund (details). It is not the Pixa Omnibus Foundation.

pixa.rex

The operator's genesis allocation of 75,000,000 VESTS. It is a restricted account (details).

pixa.team

The team and contributor allocation of 25,000,000 VESTS. It is a restricted account.

Pixa Omnibus Foundation

The foundation, based in the Cayman Islands, that stewards the protocol and speaks for the ecosystem. It holds no keys to pixa.omnibus.

Pixa Rex S.A.

The operator, based in Panama. It runs the front-end, initiated the TGE and holds the pixa.rex allocation.

Pixagram SA

The Swiss development company in Zug that develops the protocol and owns its intellectual property. Some documents call it Pixagram AG.

Design vocabulary

The design notes for PXS describe it with terms from monetary theory and cybernetics. These terms describe how the system is meant to behave. They are not objects on the chain. Each entry says where the idea meets the code.

Algedonic alert

In Beer's Viable System Model, a pain signal that skips the slow channels. In the PXS design, it is the haircut switching on when the collateral ratio falls too low. On chain, each hour the haircut applies, the chain records a system_warning operation (Viable System Model).

Atlas

The collateral base of PXS: all PIXA and Pixa Power, which together are the network's own economy. No one can add to it or draw from it to support PXS. On chain, it appears as P, the PIXA supply in the haircut formula.

Basin of attraction

The range of states a system returns to after a disturbance. Over-collateralisation is meant to widen it.

Chaotic stability

Staying inside a band rather than pinned to a single point, the way living systems persist. PXS aims for this instead of a defended price.

Corridor

The design notes' band of collateral ratios, roughly 3 to 10, inside which no haircut applies. The chain does not enforce it: printing stops at a ratio of 4, and the haircut starts below 7/3 (the two compared).

Disintermediation

Removing the layers of an issuer, custodian, reserve and redemption desk, so that holder and base meet directly. Here they meet through consensus rather than through a counterparty.

Feedback order

Beer's ladder of control:

• First order pursues a goal it is given.
• Second order chooses how to pursue it.
• Third order chooses the goal.

A defended peg is first-order. The PXS design aims higher, because its reference and its thresholds can be changed by consensus.

Homeostasis

Keeping a key variable within survivable bounds by adjusting rather than resisting. The homeostatic band is the range of collateral ratios in which no haircut applies.

Macro

The regulated flow of PXS: conversions between PXS and PIXA, whose rate the haircut adjusts. In the four-part model it is the control function.

Oracle

The sensing part of PXS: the witnesses' feeds, reduced by a median across witnesses and a median over 84 hours. It reports which way to lean; it does not promise a price (Oracle and Price Feed).

Orientation

How PXS relates to its reference. PXS promises no price: it points toward one Big Mac's worth of purchasing power without promising to reach it, and under stress it settles for less. Orientation is the opposite of a peg.

Projection

What a PXS balance is in the design's terms: the Atlas seen through the Oracle. It settles in PIXA at the haircut and gives no claim on any asset or person. See Supra.

Requisite variety

Ashby's law: a regulator must be able to respond in as many ways as the disturbances it faces. A fixed peg can only defend a single number (Variety and Regulation).

Resilience

After Walker, Holling and colleagues (2004), a system's resilience has four aspects:

• Latitude: how far it can be pushed before it cannot recover.
• Resistance: how hard it is to push.
• Precariousness: how close to that edge it already is.
• Panarchy: how much the systems above and below it shape it.

Applied to PXS: Resilience and Cascades.

Self-organised criticality

After Bak, Tang and Wiesenfeld (1987), a connected system that drifts to a critical state where one small event can set off a cascade of any size. The remedy is fewer connections and gentler slopes, not hunting for triggers (Resilience and Cascades).

Supra

What a PXS holder holds: the Atlas read through the Oracle. It is a projection that settles in PIXA at the haircut, not a claim on any asset or person.

Supracoin

The category the PXS design proposes: a unit oriented toward purchasing power, with no peg, no par claim and no issuer. PXS is a Big Mac referenced supracoin: its reference is one Big Mac, and it promises no price.

Variety attenuator

A filter that reduces the noise reaching a controller. The Oracle's two medians, across witnesses and over time, are attenuators.

Viable System Model (VSM)

Stafford Beer's model of the five functions any self-sustaining system needs: operations, coordination, control, intelligence and policy. The PXS design maps its four parts onto them (Viable System Model).