Pixel

Pixel is the first NFT made by the community, not the team. Users buy individual pixels and can paint them any color they want, or rent them out. The whole image is sold when all pixels are sold.

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Inspiration

It was a cold desert morning at burning man. As the last bits of LSD sank into the rounds of my tongue, a beam of light fell through my crown chakra. With it came a single word emblazoned in fiery yellow. I knew I was forever changed. I knew, soon the world would be too. The stroke of inspiration lingered in the back of my eye like the golden orb that rests after you stare at the sun: Aviato. A startup was born.

Lol wait. I’m not Erlich Bachman.

My idea is called pixel.

It was a cold Brooklyn morning in the warehouse office of MSCHF. As the LSD sank into… no just kidding. haha

My elevator intro is this. I was very lucky to get into a great high school. It gave me the opportunity to do research on nanoparticles, and go through several computer science classes. After I finished my AP-CS exam in a quarter of the time and still got a 5, I decided to become the only person in my graduating class NOT to go to college. I moved to New York City, slept on a couch and found someone willing to pay me minimum wage to write code. After that I cofounded a social network with some friends (one went on to found MSCHF, another managed the DoD contracts for an image recognition company). Then, I helped my brother as a contractor for his ycombinator startup.

Most recently I was the first employee at Treecard, a green fintech. I was working to move them into crypto, and the CEO encouraged me to manage the project as CFO. As a startup they needed to focus on their banking offering first and hire more devs. I was still focused on crypto so we went our separate ways.

I applied for jobs after that and got several offers. However, the back of my mind was just ‘work on crypto. work on crypto’ on a loop. I turned down all the offers. I don’t have a pile of cash to run on, and my expenses quickly ran through my savings. I found some contract work, paid some bills, and got back to work.

The idea for pixel came from my time building a social network. I was responsible for growth as well as the iOS app and backend. I realized how much data social networks have on people, and how irresponsible, if not malicious they are with it. This made me passionate about rebuilding the internet with—a seemingly contradictory combination of—privacy and openness from the beginning.

Pixel was originally intended to be a social network. Users are able to purchase what is essentially a redirect stored on-chain. (I’m assuming everyone here is technical enough or can have someone technical explain).

However, social networks have network effects, and you have to get from zero to one. I want to start pixel with a different kind of branding.

I thought it would be fun to build the million dollar NFT. This idea is based of r/place and the million dollar homepage. I’ll explain what it does in the aptly named next section.

What it does

Pixel is the million dollar NFT. A single pixel is an NFT. There are 1M of these pixel NFTs. They are stacked in rows. There are 1000 rows and 1000 columns. Together these pixels form a square image.

The owners of the individual pixel NFTs are able to change the color of their pixel. When they do, the image changes.

The NFT owners are also able to rent their pixel out to others. That way you don’t have to own a pixel to contribute to the artwork, and the owner of the NFT can make money without having to sell their NFT. This makes Pixel the first NFT project designed to make you money while you sleep.

As stated before, the goal is to make Pixel a social network. To that end, each pixel also contains a URL. Users can point this decentralized url to any website they want and host a social presence that they fully control. In the future I’ll have different pre-made pages that people can launch from their pixel, but I’m just one person. I don’t have the bandwidth right now.

When all of the NFTs are sold, I’ll take a snapshot of all the colors. This snapshot will be compiled into an image and auctioned off as it’s own NFT—The million dollar NFT.

(I’d love to give the sale money to NFT holders/renters, but I need to pay a lawyer first. I don’t have the money for that right now, but it’s on my mind)

How I built it

It’s been a process. Every day I wake up, say what I’m thankful for out loud, say what impact I’m trying to have on the world, and then sit down to write daily goals.

For a lot of days, the daily goal has just been to learn. I’ve had to build the frontend, backend, smart contracts, design the app, set the goals, find potential users, get their feedback, improve the ux, improve the narrative, on and on and on. I’m wearing many hats for sure and I’m mostly focused on getting a picture of the whole system that’s good enough to hire people for parts of it, when the time is right.

I started by writing out the story again and again. I have several notebooks full of ‘decentralized social network’ ideas. I’ve tried to cut out as much complexity as I can and narrow in on a super simple smart-contract stack.

Then I wrote those smart contracts, tests, and command line interfaces to play with them.

I added a few versions of GUIs.

I started working on onboarding. I got feedback, saw what was confusing, simplified, and rebuild as a step-by-step introduction. I’ll get more feedback and improve it again. I’m very excited to use Sequence as part of this, but I haven’t gotten to that todo yet.

Then I built an event sync to store the pixel values in dynamo db (sent through aws lambda). This cuts out the majority of read requests and keeps the project scalable.

I also had to play around with canvas to get code fast enough to render all the pixels dynamically, including showing their metadata on hover.

I wanted to add some 3D elements, so I taught myself ThreeJS and added some preliminary effects. When I’m done the image will seamlessly transition from 2D to 3D when the user zooms in enough. Each pixel will be, not just a color, but a 3D room for the owner to play around with. Again, it just takes time.

I’ve built everything I just mentioned, but they’re not all connected. Right now I’m drawing all the pieces together in preparation for a mainnet launch.

Everything is done and I’m connecting it now. I was hoping to have it fully finished to submit, but hey! I’m just one person and I’m happy with how far I’ve gotten in a short period of time.

Challenges I ran into

Self-doubt. “Get a job. It won’t work. No one will care.” The imposter syndrome is reallll. But! that’s okay. I can move mountains a rock at a time, and that’s what I’m trying to do.

So. much. to. learn. Crypto is moving fast. I’m a big believer in ZK-proofs. I really want to build on the new matic zk-evm. I also want to release the project as an app, not just a website. I think I can turn the server into a P2P network and make it so that pixel users can run a node that shares all of the off-chain state. I really believe in decentralization and think the project should be fully self-contained. It’s just not my top-priority right now. I think what the lightning team is doing with UI packages is really interesting though. I see the future stack as a bundled UI talking to a ZK-layer. Oh also, I’m learning the 3D stuff, and design and… yeah. so much to learn.

Transaction cost. I had to change my idea several times to work around transaction costs. Even MATIC’s amazingly low gas is still way too high to really rebuild the internet on. I’d love to keep more information on-chain, but it’s just not possible.

When I can get a P2P network up, I’ll use off-chain signatures to do things like streaming and video with verifiable message-digests. Again. time.

Accomplishments that I’m proud of

Turning down all of the job offers. There were some pretty great companies and salaries. That was a difficult decision, but I’m glad I made it.

Simplifying the idea and settling on something that I feel I can build by myself. I want to raise money and hire people at some point, but I don’t want to do that until I feel confident I can support them as a leader. I believe it’s my responsibility to do the lion-share of work and set a vision that can support them and create some stability. The first few steps of a startup are unknowns and chaos. I’m proud of myself for taking much of that on and getting to a point where I feel like all I have to do is finish the MVP and get to alpha users. The end is in sight.

What I learned

… what didn’t I learn? Solidity, ThreeJS, ethers, sequence, fluence, spheron, alchemy, metamask, infura, how to set up an eth node, a bunch about eth2.0, hashing, consensus mechanisms, sketch, figma, spline, how to frame a cinematic shot, man it goes on and on. I’ve been really busy working on a lot of different stuff.

What's next for Pixel

Pulling the pieces together, building a small waitlist, press launch, growth projects.

First I’ll be pulling all the pieces together into a seamless no-crypto-experience to collective-artist onboarding. I don’t think you need to understand crypto to understand this project, and I hope to make onboarding as easy as Apple Pay. Sequence is going to be a huge help there. You can see the onboarding that exists already. I’ll be going through another round of UX in the next week to get this dialed in with the wallet setup.

The smart contract works and scaling has been fine under the load tests I’ve run so far, but I’ll be checking that again as I pull everything together. I’ll get a testnet and mainnet beta of 4k pixels. I don’t anticipate problems, but am ready for surprises.

As part of pulling things together I’m also going to get a security audit and the necessary legal opinions.

Then I’ll focus on building out the waitlist and 4k beta. I have a list of around a hundred people that have shown interest during in-person conversations. I’ll be doing a lot more of this, going to NFT events, hypebeast events, talking to people at coffee shops, painting the url on my back and streaking through sporting events (okay just kidding). I’m not afraid to get out there and find the first 1k pixel owners in person.

Once there’s a base of users, I’ll send out initial press releases. I did this a lot at MSCHF and know how to craft the messaging and find the journalists. This round will just be a launch announcement and be geared towards onboarding 10k pixel owners, and getting a waitlist for the rest. I’ll scale the image size in steps so I can make sure to handle the load appropriately.

From there, I’ll run a lot of growth projects. The first project will be to put the pixels on an LCD billboard. With this I’ll send out materials for a press release on “The NFT making real changes, not just digital ones”

I also want to put solar-panel powered tablets various places and let the community discover them (like geocaching). I’m a big hiker, so I was thinking Yosemite, Mount Whitney, Kings Peak, and a few other locations. That’s another press release, but more importantly, a chance for the community to grow and find something in the real world. It really drives home the idea that your pixel changes more than just an image.

I also want to rent out an apartment building, 10k drones, light the side of a mountain, and launch a weather balloon with pixels (I have friends that can launch cube sats).

I have a ton of these ideas. A lot of my project ideas were well received internally at MSCHF and successful after external launch. I can come up with these ideas all day long.

But for now I’m just focused on pulling all the pieces together, so that there’s a place for all the hype to go to.

Long term I want to roll this hype into a social network. This matters to me, because I began my career building skinner’s boxes to keep people addicted to their screens. I want to help push forward a Web3 alternative that is designed to make the world better, not a centralized company richer. Blockchain is amazing for this because you can build public goods, which I intend to do.

It was my disinterest in money that convinced me to turn down all the job offers. I’d rather build something that helps people then have a nice salary. I’d love to get rich in the process, but I have no problem releasing my work for free if I think it can help make a world free from social-engineering-networks.

Thank you for taking the time to review this submission. I read your bios and am very impressed with each of your companies and personal work. I am very grateful to have you (and anyone else helping) take the time to hear about my idea.

With appreciation,

Josh

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