PIXEL Debuts to $441M Market Cap as Ronin Gamers Get Airdrop Tokens

Popular blockchain farming and social game Pixels debuted its PIXEL token Monday morning as planned, following multiple play-to-airdrop campaigns and a Binance Launchpool rewards program. And it’s already rising in value.

PIXEL currently has a price of over $0.58 per data from CoinGecko, rising 15.8% on the day since its morning debut. At the current price, PIXEL has a market cap of $441 million based on the circulating supply, putting the gaming token into the top 200 most valuable cryptocurrencies.

About 771 million PIXEL tokens are currently circulating, out of a maximum of 5 billion total tokens. The fully diluted valuation would be over $2.8 billion.

Binance held a rewards ramp-up campaign through its Launchpool platform, offering a total of 350 million PIXEL for customers who staked either Binance Coin (BNB) or the FDUSD stablecoin in liquidity pools for the upcoming gaming tokens. Binance then listed the PIXEL token this morning, as expected.

Over the weekend, the developers of Pixels also announced a surprise 20 million PIXEL airdrop for people who had staked Ronin’s RON token, offering a free bonus to network supporters. Ronin’s price dipped early Monday, but RON is still up 17% over the past week. Earlier this month, the token hit a two-year-high price of $3.49.

Pixels is a retro-style farming game akin to classics like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, but with a crypto token economy and NFT land plots and pets. The game was originally built on Polygon, but made its move from one Ethereum scaling network to another last fall when it migrated to Ronin, a gaming-centric sidechain.

The game is credited with driving surging adoption for Ronin, which spiked from about 20,000 daily active users last fall to approximately 700,000 of late. Developer Sky Mavis originally launched the chain for Axie Infinity in 2021, but has gradually onboarded more studios and games as Ronin takes hold as a prominent gaming blockchain network.

Players who participated in Pixels’ play-to-airdrop campaigns were granted token allocations last week, which can now be redeemed after the PIXEL token was generated Monday.