钱易qy

Pixels said something during the AMA that I think the whole crypto community should pause and seriously consider.

"The previous peak daily active user data was severely inflated due to bot and witch attacks."

So, what was the peak?

1 million.

Now, what's the real DAU?

50,000.

#pixel
This isn't a hit on Pixels. After anti-cheat measures, the remaining 50,000 may actually be of much higher quality than the bots that inflated that 1 million.

But there's one thing we can't avoid—

$PIXEL
When it goes live on Binance in February 2024, opening with a fully diluted valuation soaring to $700 million, the story everyone will be telling is fundamentally:

"This is the first game in Web3 history to break 1 million daily active users."

That number is now acknowledged by the team to be inflated.

I'm not here to assign blame. I'm speaking to a more fundamental issue:

If the key data used for pricing was wrong, how was that price determined?

Now, with a market cap of $6 million and 50,000 real users, that's a valuation of $780 per user.

In 2024, at peak, FDV $700 million, "1 million users", that's a valuation of $700 per user.

Those two numbers are almost the same.

@Pixels

Has the market repriced? Or did it just drop with the broader market without anyone seriously asking this question?

Chapter 3 is launching—can those 50,000 truly grow? That's the only variable worth watching right now.

“卧槽”
“卧槽”

Meta's acquisition of Manus just got hit with a forced 'seven-day no-questions-asked refund'!

Chinese AI entrepreneurs, after seeing this case, should you be sprinting even faster?

Meta previously shelled out about $2 billion (including deposits and advance payments) to acquire Manus, but now they're being ordered by regulators to refund the full amount. It's like they got the code for free, all data wiped clean, and not a dime spent—pure 'return' vibes.

Key points from the regulatory document are as follows: (2) Funds and Consideration Refund Meta must return the approximately $2 billion already paid back to the transaction-related accounts. Once the original shareholders receive the cash, they must complete the foreign exchange return and declaration as per regulatory requirements. Commission fees, penalties, etc. are strictly prohibited from being paid under the guise of 'compensation' or 'consultation fees'. The foreign exchange management department will be monitoring the fund flow closely, preventing capital flight under the pretext of 'terminating the deal'.

(3) Data and Tech Security Meta must delete all acquired Manus domestic user data, training data, and business data. They need to provide proof of deletion and coordinate with regulators.

I came across a number:

The average daily gaming time for global mobile gamers: 22 minutes.

This is the industry benchmark data for 2025, covering all age groups and all game types.

The Energy cap of @Pixels is 475 points = about 20 to 30 minutes of active gameplay.

Everyone is bashing this design for being too short, too dumb, and limiting player experience.

But I've been staring at these two numbers for a long time and came to a completely different conclusion—

Pixels' Energy cap perfectly aligns with the total attention span that real players are willing to invest each day.

This isn't a limitation; it's respect.

The gaming industry's default design philosophy is "keep you engaged as long as possible," with TikTok, Genshin Impact, and Honor of Kings all doing the same thing: never giving you a natural exit point.

Pixels did the opposite: it gives you a clear "today's done, come back tomorrow" signal.

Wordle applied the same logic and hit 3 million daily active users, then got acquired by The New York Times.

Of course, the premise of limited supply is that the limited thing is good enough to be worth coming back for every day. It's hard to say whether Pixels' daily loop is interesting enough before Chapter 3 launches.

#pixel
But this design choice itself, in the attention-overloaded environment of 2026, is a smarter bet than most people realize. 😂
$PIXEL

A number that no one has ever calculated:
#pixel
@Pixels , with 30% of players hailing from the Philippines.
At its peak, 1 million daily active users means about 300,000 Filipinos logging into this game daily, treating it as a source of income.

The legal daily minimum wage in the Philippines is $11. During peak times, Pixels players' daily income could reach twice that figure.

Thus emerged a group called MFW (Metaverse Filipino Workers) — former overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) who no longer need to go abroad; they just farm pixels at home.
Then PIXEL launched and plummeted by 97%.

I’m not pondering whether the token will rebound.
I’m thinking: when a game token crashes, it corresponds to the evaporation of income for 300,000 people — how should we frame this?
Is it just normal price volatility for a GameFi project?

Or is it a localized employment shock concentrated in a specific geographic area?
No one in the circle discusses PIXEL in the second language.

But the farmers in Pampanga might have been using a different logic to understand this situation.
Chapter 2's economic reconstruction was designed with great seriousness; I've studied it. But I haven’t seen a section called "Protection for the Most Vulnerable Users" in any documents.
This isn’t a critique; it’s a genuine observation. 😂
@Pixels

North Korea's Lazarus hacking nation team pulls off god-level operations!

1/ Hacks Kelp DAO, scoring a whopping 292 million rsETH

2/ Completely avoids crashing the market, directly tosses it into Aave collateral, borrowing out 190 million clean ETH

3/ Within 48 hours, Aave's TVL plummets by 8 billion, marking the first real DeFi bank run in history

4/ Arbitrum's security committee urgently freezes 71 million, which is the only money recovered

5/ The remaining 175 million is pushed into Thorchain, casually paying a 494k fee as a toll

6/ Swaps it for BTC, breaking it down into thousands of UTXO fragments

7/ Bridges it to Tron, converting everything to USDT

8/ OTC traders consolidate the funds flow, settling through UnionPay, perfectly bypassing SWIFT and sanctions

9/ Ultimately, the funds reach Pyongyang, fed into the national treasury in just 7 days, spanning 9 protocols, all fully on-chain and transparent

No one can stop it!

One question that’s been spinning in my head for three days.

What’s the moat for PIXEL?

Most people say: token consumption mechanism, Farmer Fee, Energy cap, land scarcity.

All of these are correct. But Q1 2026 gave me some data that makes those answers seem shallow—

Guild members' 30-day retention: 72%
Solo players' 30-day retention: 18%

That's a whopping 4x difference.

Same game, same token mechanics, same Energy cap. The only variable is: do you have a crew waiting for you to log in?

@Pixels proves something that traditional GameFi never truly understood—

What keeps players around isn’t just the gains, it’s the social connections.

Once you’ve got a guild, a spot, and some buddies to grind dungeons with, leaving the game isn’t just about "forfeiting a few PIXEL rewards"; it’s about "forfeiting a social connection".

The latter is way more costly than the former.

That’s the real moat of $PIXEL .
It’s not written in the white paper, but it lives in that 72% retention rate.
#pixel

The only question is: that 18% overall retention means most new players leave before building social connections.

Whether this funnel can be plugged determines if this social network can truly take off.
😂

A Discord message that went down today in a Pixels guild group

>>>>>>>>>>>>

Landlord A: How much did you rake in today?

Farmer B: Netted 0.5U, but they took a 30% cut on withdrawals

Landlord A: Typical, I had 22 people running today, made 8 bucks

Farmer B: ...... You didn’t do anything?

Landlord A: I bought land

Farmer B: I’m saving up to buy too

Landlord A: Land prices have shot up since I bought

Farmer B: How much has it gone up?

Landlord A: Nearly doubled

Farmer B: ......

Landlord A: But once Tier 5 rolls out, the land's value should change again

Farmer B: Change for the better?

Landlord A: Only landlords can use T5, you do the math

Farmer B: So it's even less affordable for me

Landlord A: That's why you gotta buy early

Farmer B: I feel like I’m already late to the party

Landlord A: 😂

This isn't a joke; this is a real convo happening daily in the $PIXEL ecosystem.

5000 bucks for land, first come, first served; the rules are set in stone.

The harshest part of this game isn't the Farmer Fee, nor the Energy cap, but the timing of your entry determines your place in the food chain, and climbing up that chain is getting tougher.

Whether it's worth getting involved, that's for you to judge.

But at least figure out what role you're playing once you're in. 😂 #pixel @Pixels

1/
The Arbitrum Security Council just pulled off some "black magic" to recover about $71 million from the Kelp DAO attacker! This transaction completely bypassed the attacker's private key and was enforced by the chain itself. Transaction details:
• Tx: 0x5618...0f6b
• Launch: 0x5618......0f6b
• Arbitrum Block: 454686044
• Arbitrum Block: 454686044
• Time: April 21, 2026 03:35 UTC From address: 0x5d39...7Ccc (marked as "Kelp DAO Exploiter 1" by Arbiscan)
To address: 0x0000...0DA0 (protocol-specific system recovery address, not a regular burn address)
Amount: 30,765.667 ETH (≈ $71M) — almost the entirety of the attacker's balance on Arbitrum.

2/
The key here is the transaction type: ArbitrumUnsignedTxType (EIP-2718 type 0x65 / 101). Regular users can't even initiate this kind of transaction! This is an ArbOS system-level transaction that only the Arbitrum chain itself (through the sequencer / ArbOS upgrade path, controlled by the Security Council) can inject. It completely bypasses the attacker's private key. In simple terms: the Security Council used emergency powers to forcibly transfer the attacker’s funds from the hub address to a recovery address controlled by the protocol.

3/
Why is this operation so "mind-blowing"? Arbitrum has no chain rollbacks, no rewriting of history, and the order of transactions on the chain remains completely intact. They utilized the built-in privilege state override mechanism in ArbOS (which has rarely been publicly used before), essentially a state-level forced recovery. The attacker's private key is still valid (able to sign transactions), but the ETH in his address has already been directly moved by the chain. This is the clearest public demonstration of the 12-of-N Security Council mechanism reserved for "catastrophic emergencies" in Arbitrum's progressive decentralization documentation.

4/
Important to note:
This only recovered a portion of the funds on the Arbitrum chain.
Approximately 75,700 ETH on the Ethereum mainnet is still in the attacker's hands, so Aave continues to face a potential bad debt risk of about $230 million.

Trump's largest internal whale account, 100% win rate, opened a $92 million 20x long position when Ethereum was at 2289 two days ago, currently in a floating profit state, the market's money is about to be earned away by Trump's insider brothers.

After being in the circle for a long time, the most common pit I've seen is not the project running away, but the valuation logic being swapped without the holders noticing.

In the AMA record on March 25, @Pixels , there is a sentence worth everyone paying attention to — they are planning to introduce USDC as the actual reward currency in Phase 4, while $PIXEL continues to serve as the staking certificate.

After reading through it, I only have one question: now that you hold $PIXEL , are you valuing it as a reward currency or as a governance certificate?

The prices calculated by these two sets of logic could differ by several times.

The reward currency relies on "consumption traffic" — the more popular the game, the more users there are, and the price has support. The governance certificate relies on "dividend rights" — you stake $PIXEL and share in the USDC reward pool generated by the Stacked system.

The problem is: most people in the market are holding coins using the former logic, while the team is slowly switching the underlying logic to the latter.

This is not a bearish signal; it is a migration of the pricing reference frame.

On the day the switch is completed, those holding coins with the old logic will find themselves unsure how to price this thing now.

#pixel
First, clarify what you are valuing; it's more useful than staring at the K-line. 😂

Brother Sun's response to the recent theft incident.

I stared blankly at @Pixels for a long time and discovered some interesting things.

Cryptocurrency claims to overthrow the old order and allow ordinary people to participate in wealth distribution. Then I found these things in a pixel farm game:

🏚️ vPIXEL = Company Scrip received by 19th-century miners, which can only be spent in the company store and cannot be exchanged for cash

⏰ Energy system = A daily limit of 475 points of mandatory labor time, but wealthy people can spend money to buy more hours

🌾 Sharecropping = Literally meaning a system of profit-sharing farming, where 5,000 landlords take a cut from the output of tenant farmers

💰 Farmer Fee = A withdrawal tax of 20-50%, where the poor must pay taxes to cash out, while the rich can choose to cycle within the system

This is not a criticism of this design; to be honest, this economic structure is more realistic and sustainable than most GameFi—because it directly replicates the logic of power that has run in human society for thousands of years.

What I find truly ironic is that after shouting for over a decade about "decentralized liberation," the community has ultimately rebuilt the feudal system intact in a 16-bit pixel landscape.

And this time it's more transparent—all the rules are written in code, and everyone can see them.

I just don’t know whether this counts as progress or regression. 😂
#pixel
$PIXEL

😂😂😂