In this Web3 circle filled with sickles, countless founders in suits and leather shoes stand in the spotlight every day, shouting about overthrowing traditional finance, building a grand decentralized metaverse, and breaking the data monopoly of Web2 giants; but after the tide recedes, if you look at the smart contracts they wrote, they often turn out to be one short-lived Ponzi scheme after another that can't withstand scrutiny, surviving only by attracting new users! And now, Pixels has chosen not to disguise itself anymore, it is almost pointing at the white paper to declare to the entire market: 'Brothers, stop guessing, I am not a purely game-based project, I am essentially an advertising intermediary traffic alliance running on the blockchain, disguised as pixels!'
It has downgraded the game itself into a 'validator', a funnel node responsible for filtering and selecting real traffic! Its ultimate business vision is not to develop a game that can rival (Zelda) or (World of Warcraft) in terms of gameplay, but to create a new type of user acquisition distribution platform with extremely compressed customer acquisition costs (CAC) and very high conversion rates!
When you carefully read that dozens of pages long white paper, you will find that it repeatedly emphasizes an internet buzzword: UA (User Acquisition)! Its ambition is to use its vast traffic pool to attract more Web2 traditional games that crave traffic and user-deficient Web3 emerging projects to join its ecological matrix! Why would others willingly pay you a protection fee to join? Just because Pixels holds tightly to hundreds of thousands of highly quality active users who have been educated by the market, are proficient in wallet mnemonic phrases, have real transaction records, and have even been tagged with hundreds or thousands of refined behavioral labels by the backend!
Everyone think about it, for a game studio that has just completed fundraising and urgently needs to deliver impressive operational data, if they spend money on traditional platforms like Facebook, Google, or TikTok, the cost is simply exorbitant, and how much of the purchased traffic is from bot clicks, and what the final conversion rate can be, all depends on luck! However, in the traffic ecosystem built by Pixels based on smart contracts, all conversion nodes are transparently traceable on-chain, and all returns from advertising placements are accurately calculated based on that cold RORS model!
The core killing move of this business logic is actually to completely objectify us players into 'data fuel' that nourishes the platform! Every tree you chop in the game, every interactive task you perform, and even every social chat you send in the public screen is precisely captured by the backend Events API, transformed into invaluable first-party exclusive data! This endless stream of data is continuously fed into their risk control model, making the model smarter and increasing the efficiency of token distribution, while the accuracy in catching woolly sheep has reached an appalling level!
As an engineer who often studies zero-knowledge proofs and the 'rational privacy' track, what I care about most when running Midnight Network nodes and researching selective data disclosure is protecting users' on-chain privacy; but look at what Pixels is doing? They are going against the grain, crazily extracting and analyzing users' behavioral trajectories. This is no longer about creating a light and enjoyable casual game, but clearly about building a decentralized AppsFlyer (a globally renowned mobile attribution and marketing analytics platform) in the Web3 domain!
They are using the most traditional, even the most tedious Web2 internet traffic monetization logic to forcibly patch the web3 utopian dream that is riddled with holes due to excessive decentralization! To be honest, as a veteran who has been in the circle for so long, seeing this fundamental logic transformation, I feel a sense of ideal disillusionment - we tech geeks once naively thought that the blockchain's trustless mechanism and token economics could bring about a super pure global collaborative model beyond traditional capital exploitation, but after everyone tussled and fought in the bull and bear markets, we found that the ones who can truly survive through the ups and downs are still those traditional businessmen who hold an abacus, are proficient in traffic monetization, and calculate user acquisition costs to the bone!
We must admit that the pastoral era where everyone logged on to their computers to farm and crazy woolly sheep has indeed gone forever! The early Pixels, where you could easily earn half a month's salary with just a few clicks and some button scripts, has completely died at the tail end of that bull market two years ago!
Now it is transforming at a visible speed into an extremely large, precise, and cold data computation center! It will track every cooperating token that connects to its ecosystem with extreme rigor, conducting meticulous on-chain audits of every token reward that flows out of the treasury! It is attempting to create an illusion of an 'internal circulation consumption economy', locking users' attention and funds tightly within the pixel matrix woven by its code, squeezing out the last drop of value!
Do you ask me if this model, which has completely leaned towards the logic of Web2 big companies, can ultimately achieve commercial success?
Actually, I don't have a clear answer either! I only know one thing: in this wild west filled with runaway projects and rampant speculation, a team that dares to clearly write on the first page of the white paper 'I want to earn your money', 'I absolutely will not allow you sheeple to freeload my liquidity' shows a level of ambition and courage that is at least a hundred times better than those black-hearted teams that talk about 'changing the world, DeFi revolution', while secretly withdrawing liquidity pools and dumping tokens in the dead of night!
At the end of the article, as someone who has been deeply involved in this industry, grinding code and seeing through various economic models, I want to say something heartfelt to everyone!
We veterans who have experienced multiple bull and bear markets have long seen through this cruel world. The end of the Web3 industry is never some ethereal belief, but extreme commercial efficiency and ruthless risk control! In this extremely competitive track, whoever can use technology to minimize the inflation cost of randomly issuing tokens, and whoever can maximize the commercial value of each individual user through data analysis, will survive in this brutal cycle of endurance and become the final winner!
The Pixels team has clearly wised up; they are no longer willing to be the victims drained dry by countless studios. They have not only learned to stop the bleeding, but they have also learned how to use their traffic advantage to extract from other project parties! This sounds incredibly cold-blooded, but it is the most real and stark survival rule in the current market environment!
Code never lies, and calculators running on servers have no human emotions! In this dark jungle still lurking with countless gold farming vampires and automated scripts, the project side finally put aside all posturing and fantasies, taking up the most tedious and utilitarian logic of big internet companies to deal with human greed!
As for those still searching for so-called 'gold farming magic plates' in various communities today, and reminiscing about the old dreams of getting rich by farming with dozens of windows, they really should have been splashed with a bucket of cold water to wake up! The neon lights of this huge Web3 casino are indeed still flashing, and the doors are still wide open, but that charity event handing out chips for free at the entrance has completely announced its end; the rules of the game have changed, and now it's time for the house to close the doors and settle accounts!
