Design Principles

Pixagram inherits its founding ideas from Steem and adds a few of its own. Each principle below gives the idea, how the chain puts it into practice, and where that practice is still incomplete. The aim is a list readers can hold the project to.

Three principles inherited from Steem

The Steem whitepaper opens with three principles:

1. Everyone who contributes to a venture should receive a share of it.
2. All forms of capital are equally valuable. Time and attention spent producing and curating are worth as much as money: this is sweat equity.
3. A community creates value to serve its own members.

Pixagram keeps all three and sharpens the first two.

The principles

1. Contribution earns a share; holding earns nothing

Idea. New tokens go to the people who do the work: artists who publish, curators who find good work early, witnesses who run the network, and proposals the community funds.

In the protocol. New PIXA is issued every block and split between the reward fund, the witnesses and the Decentralized Pixa Fund. Pixa removed both of Hive's rewards for passive holding: interest on the debt-style token, and the share of issuance paid to stake. The only reward stake earns is curation, which requires voting (Issuance).

Still incomplete. A vote moves rewards only once an account holds more than 2,500 Pixa Power. Small accounts can publish and earn, but not yet curate (Voting and Curation).

2. The work is the record

Idea. An artwork should not depend on a server staying online.

In the protocol. The app writes each artwork into its post as a lossless WebP image, so the image travels with the chain's history. The author's signature and the block's time record who published what, and when (Permanence and Provenance).

Still incomplete. Images inside blog posts are links to files stored elsewhere. Provenance shows who posted a work first, not who made it.

3. Participation should not cost a fee

Idea. In the Steem whitepaper's words, "micropayments don't work." Asking someone to pay for every like or post drives them away.

In the protocol. Most operations draw on Resource Credits, which recharge from stake.

Still incomplete. Three operations keep a fee, each to deter abuse: opening an account, creating a proposal, and converting PIXA into PXS (list).

4. Promise less, and say what is true

Idea. A system that promises a fixed value has to defend it, and defences fail. Pixa's second token, PXS, promises no price. Under stress it settles for less rather than defending a number (PXS at a Glance).

Applied to documentation. The same rule applies to the project's own documents: they state what the chain enforces, and they flag where older plans or designs differ (Style Guide).

5. Separate the powers

Idea. No single party should be able to issue, spend and rule.

In the protocol:

• The genesis allocations cannot vote. They can only hand out stake (restricted accounts).
• The community fund has no keys. It pays only proposals that stakeholders approve.
• Protocol changes need the witnesses. A change activates only when enough elected witnesses run it.
• Off chain, the work is split. Development, stewardship and operation sit with three separate legal entities (Who Does What).

Still incomplete. Separation on paper is not yet distribution in practice. On 2026-10-05, a handful of accounts held almost all of the stake that can vote (Decentralization and Safeguards).

6. Serve the members

Idea. Steem's third principle: the community serves its own members.

In practice:

• Communities let members organise themselves (Communities).
• The fund lets them finance what they need (Decentralized Pixa Fund).
• No fee for joining. The app opens accounts at no cost to the user.

7. Build on proven code, change only what you must

Idea. Hive's code has run in public since 2016.

In practice. Pixa changes a short, documented list of rules and keeps everything else, so tools written for Hive work once they are set to Pixa's chain ID, key prefix and token symbols (Chain Parameters). Hardfork 29 fixed the inherited reward denominator that a new chain could not use.

Inherited → changed

Sources

• Steem whitepaper: introduction (the three principles), "Micropayments Don't Work", "Distributing Currency".
• Hive whitepaper, §II.4–II.5.
• Chain rules: Chain Parameters; live stake figures: Decentralization and Safeguards.