By
Andrea Candela
November 3, 2025
5 Min Read
In the world of Web3 gaming, high engagement often runs into economic volatility. Pixels, the massive social Web3 gaming universe with an extensive, active community, faced the crucial challenge of turning short-term player activity into long-term, sustainable value for its community.
The solution wasn't just another feature, it was building a complete economic foundation: a staking platform designed to reward commitment and align the entire community's interests with the growth of the Pixels ecosystem.
LimeChain partnered with Pixels to deliver this platform, taking a holistic role that spanned brand-aligned UX design, secure smart contract architecture, and future-proofing the technology for cross-chain expansion.
Key Results (As of October 21ст, 2025):
The founder of Pixels, Luke Barwikowski, understood that for any game universe to thrive, its community needs room to grow, innovate, and claim ownership.
As the old saying goes, "The size of the dragon depends on the amount of room it has." If a massive community is confined to limited economic mechanisms, their potential is stifled. The popular "play-to-earn" mechanic, while effective for attracting users, often becomes a treadmill—it rewards effort but doesn't necessarily create deep, long-lasting economic roots. Luke saw that the missing piece was a true economic sink that rewards holding and commitment alongside playing.
The goal was clear: build a secure mechanism for users to stake their PIXEL tokens, earning rewards and essentially "investing" in the overall growth of the ecosystem—be it new games, guilds, or user-generated content (UGC). This required an invisible, robust economic foundation that could grow with the game itself.
Luke’s vision for Pixels wasn't just to make the best Web3 game; it was to own the Web3 gaming vertical. This meant building a world where gameplay, social features, and financial utility were all woven together.
"Our goal over the next year," Luke explains, "is to pick all the best things that are working
and bring it into the context of the game and into our ecosystem... we’re expanding in a couple different verticals and soon we’re going to have UGC content too. It’s kind of like all these different areas that we see that’s working Web3 we want to get our hands on it a little bit."
To realize this, the staking platform had to be the economic engine powering this expansion. It needed to be the place where the community's treasure was stored, guarded, and used to fund the next grand adventure.
We didn’t just build smart contracts - we focused on creating a complete, integrated product. The team approached the staking platform like a blueprint for a fortress, ensuring the architecture was sound, the access points were clear, and the foundations were laid for future upgrades.
A staking platform is useless if it feels like navigating a spreadsheet. Our first task was to translate the complex smart contract logic into a simple, engaging user experience that felt like a natural extension of the Pixels universe.
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We employed an iterative Design Process (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test, Repeat) to craft a user journey that was intuitive, removing the need for a player to be a blockchain expert. The resulting design provides a clean interface for staking, claiming rewards, and withdrawing, all while adhering to the unique Pixels brand identity.
"Our priority was abstracting the blockchain's complexity entirely. We wanted a user journey so intuitive that staking felt as seamless as playing a quest in the game, ensuring the economic backbone supported, rather than complicated, the gaming experience." — Vankiz, UX/UI Head, LimeChain
The back end of the platform is where the real complexity lives, and where we applied our deep blockchain experience.
Smart Contract Security and Upgrades
Since Ronin was the ideal chain for a gaming dApp, we built the foundation there. To guarantee the future growth Luke envisioned, we implemented the Beacon Proxy pattern. This setup allows the core staking logic to be upgraded in a single transaction, making it safe and efficient to deploy new features (like multi-token rewards or new staking games) without requiring every user to migrate their funds. All contracts were, of course, thoroughly audited by a trusted external firm.
The Core Economic Contracts: Factory, Vault, Distributor, and Cross-Chain Channels
The economic spine of the platform relies on four major contract systems. The Factory Contract acts as the grand architect, managing the creation of new staking games and setting all configurable parameters (lock duration, fees, etc.). It’s the launchpad for any new economic vertical Pixels creates. The actual user-facing vault is the Cross Chain Staking Contract, which implements staking with dual token support and multi-token rewards.
This contract handles all key player actions—staking, unstaking, and withdrawals—and also uses the Beacon Proxy pattern to remain seamlessly upgradeable. The rewards distribution contract manages and oversees the daily distribution of rewards across all staking pools, with the flexibility to use any ERC-20 token as a reward. Crucially, the cross chain communication contract integrates ChainLink CCIP (Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol), providing the secure, future-proof pathway responsible for all cross-chain operations and data validation.
Real-Time Data Flow
To ensure players always see accurate figures, the system runs on a robust stack. The front end communicates with a backend data storage, a mailing service for notifications, and indexers which constantly "listen" to the smart contracts, ensuring real-time data on stakes, rewards, and APR is pulled, processed, and displayed instantly.
LimeChain architected the platform not just for today, but also for future scale.
The Pixels staking platform is more than just a place to hold tokens; it is the fortified treasury that secures the ecosystem's future. The initial results speak for themselves: over 176 million PIXEL staked by 10,000 users validates the community’s trust in the long-term vision.
By providing a holistic solution that covered intuitive UX design and a complex, upgradeable, and cross-chain-ready architecture, LimeChain helped Pixels move confidently into its next chapter of growth. The castle is built, the treasury is secure, and the dragon has all the room it needs to roam.
"LimeChain's ability to deliver across strategy, UX, and smart contract architecture was essential. Their holistic approach didn't just meet our immediate needs on Ronin, it also set the secure and scalable ground for our cross-chain expansion and our vision to integrate every valuable Web3 vertical into the Pixels ecosystem." — Luke Barwikowski, Founder of Pixels
