It’s been a busy—and buzzy—few months for the crypto game Pixels, which saw surging interest after migrating from Polygon to the Ronin blockchain in October.

But while the game has been in development since 2021, founder Luke Barwikowski said that next week’s launch of the long-awaited PIXEL token makes it feel like “day one” for the team as they fully implement the social farming game’s crypto vision.

“The fact that we're launching on Binance… the fact that all of this stuff is happening and we're reaching the full expression of launching a token is pretty amazing,” he told Decrypt’s GG. “Now the fun starts, right? I just view this as literally day one of everything that we're working on. We have stuff that's releasing, but now it's a long road ahead of us too.”

As announced last week, the PIXEL token will be listed on crypto exchange Binance on February 19 following a 10-day Launchpool campaign, in which Binance customers can earn a share of PIXEL token rewards for staking certain other cryptocurrencies.

At the same time, Pixels is doling out PIXEL airdrop reward allocations to tens of thousands of unique wallets, including users who qualified through previous “play-to-airdrop” campaigns in the game, as well as Pixels NFT land owners.

Decrypt’s GG caught up with Barwikowski on Monday to discuss everything around the token launch and upcoming plans for the ever-evolving game.

In the video clip above, the Pixels founder details the current vibe around the project, as well as the long road that led to this moment—including pivoting from a business-centric online events focus. Ultimately, it was 2021’s rise of NFT gaming smash Axie Infinity that pushed him in that direction, and showed him the value of crypto to power applications and experiences.

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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...

“[Axie] was one of the initial applications that finally clicked and made sense,” he said, “where it was like: Oh wow, cryptocurrency actually has some pretty interesting use cases when you start to integrate it into things that actually have value, or systems or economics that have real value behind them.”

“I grew up playing Runescape. The connection just was very obvious to me there, between Web3 currencies and in-game currencies,” Barwikowski added. “Those things together, combined, made me really, really interested in moving into Web3 gaming. We kind of made the whole company pivot into that direction, and things just clicked a lot more.”

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So while Pixels has seen a substantially brighter spotlight over the past few months, it’s been a long and twisting journey to get to this point. But launching a token was always meant to be a key turning point for Pixels, and it’s an event that the game will share with its community.

“I have been a huge believer in tokens and Web3 since the very beginning,” Barwikowski said. “To me, this was kind of what the whole point of all of this was—to get to here, exactly.”

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.