Pixa
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Resource Credits

Status: Live

Costs were measured on 2026-10-05, between blocks 895,213 and 895,300, before hardfork 30 changed the pricing of custom operations. They change every block with network use.

Pixa does not charge a fee for posting, voting or sending tokens. Instead, every account has a stock of Resource Credits (RC) that operations use up and that recharge over time, in proportion to the account's stake. This page explains why, how credits are counted and priced, and what they buy today.

Why credits instead of fees

The Steem whitepaper's argument still holds. Micropayments don't work. Asking someone to pay a cent to like a picture makes them stop and decide, and that decision costs more than the cent. Fees also lock out newcomers who hold no tokens yet.

Resource Credits replace the fee with an allowance. Your stake entitles you to a share of the chain's capacity, which renews every day. Spam is still expensive: flooding the chain would need a large stake, and the stake would only buy a limited rate.

How credits are counted

  • Size of the stock. Your maximum is about 1,000,000 credits per Pixa Power you can use: your own, plus any lent to you, minus any you have lent out and this week's power-down instalment. Every account also has a small bonus: the account creation fee in force when it was opened, valued in VESTS, even if it was opened with a ticket.
  • Recharge. Credits recharge at 20% of the maximum per day, so an empty account is full again after 5 days.
  • Spending. An operation that costs more credits than you hold is rejected by the node you send it to. Credits are checked by each node, not by consensus.
  • Delegation. You can lend credits to other accounts with a custom_json operation (id rc, action delegate_rc), up to 100 accounts at a time. You can lend only your own credits. On 2026-10-05 one such delegation existed.

How operations are priced

The chain prices five resources. Every transaction uses the first three:

Resource What it measures
History The transaction's size in bytes, stored forever in the block log
State The memory the operation adds to every node's live state
Execution The time needed to process it, including signature checks
Market Extra history cost, charged only when a transaction contains a transfer or a market operation
New accounts Account tickets, charged only when a ticket is claimed with credits

Each resource has a pool that refills every block, and its price rises as the pool runs low. Prices are recalculated every block from the last 24 hours of use, so a single large post can move them by a third on a chain as quiet as Pixa is today. On 2026-10-05, the history resource dominated: about 128 credits per byte.

Custom operations since hardfork 30. A custom_json or custom operation used to be charged a flat execution cost whatever its payload, so a 64 KiB payload, eight times Hive's limit, cost no more to execute than a follow. Since 2026-10-07 the execution part is multiplied by 1 + payload bytes ÷ 8,192: a 64 KiB payload pays nine times the execution cost of a small one, on top of the history cost its bytes always carried (Operations Reference). The table below predates the change; it affects only large custom payloads.

What credits buy today

Operation Credits (2026-10-05) At the previous day's usage
Vote (121 bytes) 20,492 18,305
Transfer, no memo (114 bytes) 17,562 14,877
Follow or other small custom_json (170 bytes) 24,628 19,711
Artwork post, 26 kB body 3,756,396 2,822,873
Artwork post, 100 kB body 13,258,626 9,472,463
Account ticket (claim_account) about 303,900,000 about the same

What a day's recharge pays for at those prices:

Pixa Power Votes Transfers 26 kB artworks 100 kB artworks Account tickets
100 975 1,138 5 1 none
1,000 9,759 11,388 53 15 0.66
10,000 97,599 113,882 532 150 6.6

Other limits apply first:

  • Voting mana allows about 10 full-strength votes a day (Voting and Curation).
  • Posting is limited to one top-level post every 5 minutes.

Account tickets

Opening an account costs either the account creation fee (20.000 PIXA on 2026-10-05, which is burned) or a ticket claimed with credits.

  • What a ticket costs. About 304 million credits, a full day's recharge for about 1,500 Pixa Power.
  • Where tickets come from. They are drawn from a shared subsidy pool, with room for about 15,600 on 2026-10-05.
  • When they can be claimed. A ticket can be claimed only in a block whose producing witness has subsidy left. Once claimed, it can be spent at any time.

Fees that remain

Three operations still carry a fee on top of credits, each to deter abuse:

  • opening an account
  • creating a DPF proposal
  • converting PIXA into PXS

The fees are listed in Chain Parameters.

Inherited → changed

Aspect Steem / Hive Pixa
Model Resource Credits since Steem's hardfork 20 (2018) same, unchanged code
Credits per staked token about 1,608 million per Hive Power on Hive about 1 million per Pixa Power
Credit delegation Since Hive's hardfork 26 same
Recharge 5 days 5 days

Credits per staked token differ only because a VESTS is worth far more here. What counts is your share of all stake, which is the same on both chains.

Sources