Who is willing to burn money willingly? Have you ever calculated that fantastical market account late at night when it’s quiet? Every day in Pixels, this old pixel community that seems completely unrelated to high quality, people rush to buy acceleration items to build houses, go on a shopping spree for limited skins to stand out from others, or even just to get a pet that has no actual combat power enhancement, the funds that are forever thrown into a black hole and destroyed on the chain, if summed up, would definitely be a number that sends shivers down your spine due to its irrationality.
This phenomenon is understandable in traditional consumer markets, but if thrown into the cryptocurrency realm, where everything only talks about return on investment (ROI) and everyone claims to treat time as money under the jungle law, it seems extremely counterintuitive. Why? Because this is a group of people who claim to be the coldest and most calculating about profits, yet in this environment, a large number of retail investors and big shots are actually willing to throw their precious chips into a void item that can't even generate a hint of the next expected dividend?
Understanding this issue means you have touched upon the most ruthless and successful systemic transformation behind Pixels in the entire product life cycle: completely severing the expectation of appreciation and forcibly downgrading it to pure consumerism.
Looking back a year or two ago, when all the so-called Web3 developers in the industry were still racking their brains in conference rooms about what extremely complex lock-up models to use, or even how many shares of counterfeit money to print to sustain that illusion of an annualized rate of return of up to two hundred percent, the rule makers here had already pulled the plug.
They tell everyone who wants to enter the market through almost forceful announcements — stop that unrealistic fantasy, don't expect the chips you have spent to bring you a wealth like exponential returns in the future. What you lose in tangible assets by using real money to buy $PIXEL in exchange for a building acceleration time card or a set of eye-catching costumes that walk around the square is indeed your paper assets, but what you gain is the high and low identity recognition within this community of tens of thousands, that little bit of weak yet extremely gratifying vanity.
When #pixel , a token that was originally sanctified as a so-called 'governance/gold farming privilege token' that could earn passive income, was completely suppressed and elevated to a purely premium consumption card (Premium Currency), this entire massive economic flywheel fundamentally completed its shift in life and death speed. From that moment on, it was no longer a market of who could run faster in a pass-the-parcel style of funding; it effectively became a toll booth selling emotions, services, and collecting protection fees.
Those bottom-tier marginal players who curse daily on social media, calculating the maturity time of crops while lamenting the project's painfully slow payback, are completely unaware that from the very first day the system designed this closed-loop mechanism, they were already placed on the list to be exploited or marginalized.
The ones who are really injecting blood into this crazy longevity system with real money are those irrational wealthy individuals who don't care at all about the damn yield curve, but are desperately spending money to protect the face of large guilds and for the so-called personalized reputation status of servers. This is also the ultimate cruel truth of all long-lived projects: making money is always a trap designed for a few, while spending money is the only way that ensnares the majority.