'Pixels' Airdrop Begins Ahead of Ronin Game's Token Launch

After announcing this week that the much anticipated PIXEL token will launch on February 19, the team behind the popular Ronin blockchain game Pixels revealed that airdrop allocations are already going out to players—and the team has raised funding, too.

The latest updates continue a flurry of announcements around Pixels and its PIXEL token, following its migration to Ethereum scaling network Ronin last fall.

The move prompted an enormous surge in active users on the gaming network—from about 20,000 unique wallets in November to 665,000 this week, per data from Nansen—as users jumped into Pixels to take advantage of its play-to-airdrop rewards campaign. And now the end is in sight.

With the token launch now ten days away, crypto exchange Binance debuted its Launchpool rewards program around PIXEL early Friday. Binance customers who stake Binance Coin (BNB) or the FSUSD stablecoin in liquidity pools ahead of the launch will be eligible to receive a share of token rewards.

Binance will offer up 350 million PIXEL in rewards, representing 7% of the token’s total supply, before ultimately listing the token on its exchange on February 19.

“In just about a week or two, Pixels is about to be one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world, and one of the largest Web3 gaming coins in the world too,” Pixels founder Luke Barwikowski said in a livestream on Thursday.

In the meantime, Pixels is already rewarding players with off-chain token allocations, which will turn into real on-chain PIXEL tokens on Ronin once the token generation event (TGE) occurs. Eligible users can view their airdrop allocations via the Pixel website.

Some 28,000 Pixels players earned a share of tokens due to two play-to-airdrop campaigns, which rewarded them for simply playing the retro-style social farming game. On top of that, owners of Pixels NFT land plots during the initial play-to-airdrop campaign last year are also being awarded PIXEL tokens.

Amid the airdrop and token launch frenzy, the Pixels Foundation also announced late Thursday that it had raised $4.8 million in strategic funding from various investors. The round includes participation from Framework Ventures, Collab + Currency, Volt Capital, Axie Infinity creator Sky Mavis, Yield Guild Games co-founder Gabby Dizon, and many others.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.