PIXEL Token Launch 'Very Close' as Pixels Game Sets Play-to-Airdrop End

Pixels, a popular web-based farming and social game that uses Ethereum sidechain network Ronin, announced that it will end its Play-to-Airdrop 2.0 campaign on Friday, setting the stage for the long-awaited PIXEL token launch and distribution to players.

The Play-to-Airdrop 2.0 initiative, which lets players climb the in-game leaderboard for a chance to earn PIXEL tokens, will finish tomorrow, January 19 at 3 p.m. ET, the developers announced Wednesday. In a livestream, Pixels founder Luke Barwikowski said that the competition will not be extended, as the token launch is finally nearing.

“We're not going to extend the Play-to-Airdrop—this is it. This is the last chance to earn the PIXEL token before we do the token generation event,” he said. “We won’t do another season, I promise. The PIXEL token is very close. We're really excited about the next stages.”

A total of 8,000 players will be granted a token allocation from the current campaign, including the top 7,000 finishers on the in-game leaderboard. Another 1,000 players will be randomly selected for the airdrop, so long as they earned at least 3,000 in-game points during the initiative.

Barwikowski said the team will weed out any suspected “bots” that were attempting to farm the airdrop before finalizing the leaderboard results, but will include time for appeals for any false positives during that process. Ultimately, the 8,000 winning players will join another 20,000 players from the first Play-to-Airdrop campaign to earn a share of PIXEL tokens.

Echoing previous comments about social media scams around the upcoming airdrop, Barwikowski recommended that players remain vigilant, and said that players will not have to sign any transactions with a wallet to claim their airdropped tokens. The claim will happen in-game with the allocations determined off-chain, he added.

No allocation estimates have been provided yet, nor has Pixels announced a launch date for the PIXEL token. But Bawikowski affirmed that the launch is “super close.”

Until it happens, however, Pixels plans to launch a “Pixmas” giveaway promotion, with potential prizes like in-game land plots and items. However, this promotion will not be used to award additional PIXEL tokens following the end of the Play-to-Airdrop 2.0 campaign.

While this is the final chance to earn PIXEL tokens before the launch, Barwikowski added that additional play-to-earn mechanics will be added to the game over time, especially with the eventual launch of the game’s “Chapter 2” update.

Pixels migrated from Ethereum scaling network Polygon to Ronin on October 31, spurring a significant boom in users for the gaming sidechain created by the team behind Axie Infinity.

Ronin had nearly 180,000 daily active players earlier this week, per data shared by Axie Infinity co-founder Jeff Zirlin—a vast spike from the approximately 20,000 daily players registered before the Pixels migration.