Pixels (PIXEL) sustainability report

Pixels is present on the following networks: Ethereum, Ronin.

Ethereum reaches agreement through proof of stake, adopted in September 2022 when the original mining-based chain was retired in favor of a validator-driven consensus layer. The protocol family is usually referred to as Gasper. A fork-choice rule named LMD-GHOST selects the head of the chain by following the branch carrying the greatest accumulated weight of validator votes, while a separate finality gadget, Casper FFG, periodically justifies and then finalizes checkpoints, so that reversing them would require destroying an enormous quantity of bonded value.

Time is divided into slots of twelve seconds, and thirty-two slots form an epoch. For each slot the protocol pseudo-randomly designates one active validator to assemble and publish a block, and assigns the rest to committees that vote on what they believe is the correct head and the correct checkpoints. Under healthy conditions a checkpoint becomes final two epochs after it is proposed, a little under thirteen minutes, after which everything beneath it is treated as settled.

Joining the validator set requires a deposit of no fewer than 32 units of the native asset. Since the protocol upgrade of May 2025 a single validator may hold a far larger balance, up to 2,048 units, and earn on the whole of it, which lets an operator running many minimum-sized validators consolidate them into fewer; the activation floor itself did not change. Entry and exit are rate-limited by a queue measured in staked weight rather than in validator headcount, which bounds how fast the composition of the set can turn over.

Security rests on voting power being bonded. A validator that signs contradictory messages can be proved to have done so and is penalized, and the size of that penalty scales with how much other stake was penalized at the same time, so a coordinated attack is punished far more severely than an isolated fault. Should the chain stop finalizing altogether, a separate mechanism gradually erodes the balances of validators that are not participating until the remainder again represents a large enough majority to finalize. Upgrades during 2024 and 2025 changed how large data payloads are distributed and sampled between nodes, without altering this underlying agreement process.

Ronin began as a sidechain built to carry the transaction volume of a single gaming application that the Ethereum main chain could not absorb cheaply. It launched in 2021 under an authority-based model in which a hand-picked group produced every block, and moved in April 2023 to a delegated staking model: twenty-two slots, twelve held by institutional operators confirmed through governance and ten open to any candidate that bonded enough of the native asset and attracted enough delegated stake to rank into the set. A 2024 change rotated the block-producing subset each epoch so that every member of the set, not only the largest, took turns producing and earning. Blocks arrived every three seconds and were treated as final once two-thirds of the set had signed.

That architecture no longer runs. In May 2026, following a vote of the operator set, the network hard-forked into a Layer 2 that settles on Ethereum and is built on the OP Stack. Block production passed from the rotating set to a single sequencer operated under contract. Batched transaction data goes to an external data availability service rather than onto Ethereum, with only commitments recorded on the settlement chain, which places the design in the optimium category rather than among rollups proper. State roots are proposed to Ethereum and remain open to dispute for a challenge window of several days. The proposer and challenger roles are currently permissioned, so the correctness of settled state depends on the honesty of designated parties, with a dispute game backed by validity proofs planned to remove that dependency. A user facing censorship can force a transaction in through the Ethereum contracts.

The bridge was rebuilt after the 2022 compromise, in which an attacker obtained enough validator signing keys to authorize withdrawals directly. The signer set was widened well beyond its original size and spread across independent organizations, approval thresholds were raised to a large supermajority, and daily withdrawal ceilings and anomaly monitoring were introduced. Asset transfers were later moved onto an external cross-chain messaging protocol and the original gateway deprecated; the canonical bridge contracts deployed during the Layer 2 migration do not yet hold the network's bridged liquidity.

Pixels is present on the following networks: Ethereum, Ronin.

Payment inside the protocol flows to validators, the only participants the consensus layer compensates directly. A validator earns newly issued units of the network's native asset for voting promptly and correctly on the head of the chain and on the checkpoints being justified, for serving its turn in the committee that signs headers for light clients, and, when selected to propose, for the block itself. The proposer additionally keeps the priority portion of the fees in that block, together with whatever it receives from the separate market through which many proposers outsource block assembly. There is no delegation inside the consensus rules: stake is either operated directly or entrusted to an operator through arrangements that sit outside the protocol.

Users pay for execution in gas, metered per operation, with writes to persistent state priced far above arithmetic. Every transaction carries a base fee per unit of gas that the protocol sets algorithmically from how full recent blocks have been, and that amount is destroyed rather than paid to anyone, so sustained demand withdraws native asset from circulation. On top of it a user adds a voluntary tip, which goes to the proposer and governs how quickly the transaction is picked up. Data posted on behalf of Layer 2 networks is priced in a second, independent market whose fee is likewise destroyed; a December 2025 upgrade tied the floor of that market to ordinary execution costs so it cannot collapse to a negligible level, and capped the gas any one transaction may consume.

Penalties mirror the rewards. Failing to vote, or voting late or incorrectly, costs a validator roughly what correct behavior would have earned it. Provable equivocation is treated far more harshly: the offender is scheduled for ejection, forfeits part of its balance immediately, and later incurs an additional correlated penalty computed from how much other stake was penalized nearby in time. Prolonged absence while the chain is failing to finalize drains balances until finality can resume. Stakers may take out accumulated rewards without leaving the set, and since 2025 may also trigger a full exit from the execution layer rather than only from the consensus client.

Fees are paid in the network's native asset, which was kept as the gas asset through the Layer 2 migration. A transaction carries an algorithmically set base fee that tracks demand for block space and an optional priority fee buying earlier inclusion. Smart contract execution is metered in gas and priced by the same components, and stored state attracts no recurring rent beyond the gas cost of writing it. Behind the fee a user sees lie two costs the network bears itself: publishing batched transaction data to the external availability service, and submitting state roots and commitments to the settlement chain. These are met from network revenue rather than itemized to the user, and sequencer revenue net of them accrues to a protocol treasury.

The incentive model changed with the migration, and it changed direction. Under the sidechain, operators earned newly issued native asset and a share of fees for producing and validating blocks, while holders who delegated to an operator received a proportional share of that operator's rewards after commission. Bonded stake was exposed to slashing for signing conflicting blocks and to lesser penalties for downtime, so the choice of operator carried real risk for a delegator. Duty on the bridge was compensated separately from a dedicated allocation.

Since block production is now a sequencer's responsibility, rewards for passively bonded stake are being wound down and the issuance that funded them redirected to the treasury. In their place the protocol pays applications rather than infrastructure. Contracts register to be measured, and rewards are allocated according to observed on-chain contribution: principally the gas an application generates, the value it holds and the user activity it brings. Governance, formerly exercised through the institutional subset of the operator set, is moving toward voting weighted by holdings of the native asset over treasury allocation and protocol decisions. Operators retain roles in governance and in administering delegated stake, but payment for simply occupying a validator slot is not the model the network is built on going forward.

Pixels is present on the following networks: Ethereum, Ronin.

The figure reported for this network is assembled machine by machine, treating the computers that run the protocol as the thing that draws electricity. The starting point is an estimate of how many independent nodes are operating, built from crawlers that walk the peer-to-peer layer and record every peer they can reach, supplemented by public listings of infrastructure and staking providers and by the protocol's own visible record of how much stake is active and how it is spread across operators.

A representative hardware profile is then inferred for those machines. The client software publishes what it requires in processor, memory and disk terms, and operators have little reason to provision far beyond that, so the profile is derived from those stated requirements rather than from a survey of individual operators. Power draw for the resulting device classes comes from measurement on representative equipment under controlled laboratory conditions, capturing both the load validating places on a machine and the draw of a machine that is powered on but momentarily idle, which for a network of this kind accounts for a large share of the total. Multiplying measured per-device draw across the estimated population over the reporting period yields the network figure. Where a disclosure concerns one of the many assets issued on this network rather than the network itself, a portion of the network total is assigned to it in proportion to observed on-chain transfer volumes.

The limits deserve stating plainly. The node count records what is reachable, not a census, and machines behind restrictive network configurations are missed. The hardware profile is a reasoned inference from published software requirements, not a record of what any particular operator bought. Nothing here is metered at the wall. Where the evidence runs out, the assumptions chosen are those that push the estimate upward rather than downward, so the result is more likely to overstate consumption than to understate it, and it is revised as observation improves. The network's own account of its energy profile is published at Ethereum energy consumption.

This network settles on another chain, so its estimate has more than one part. The first is the infrastructure it runs itself: the sequencer that orders and executes transactions, the batching software that submits transaction data to the external availability service, the component that proposes state roots to the settlement chain, and the population of full nodes, archive nodes and public endpoint servers that hold state and serve applications. That population is estimated from crawlers walking the peer-to-peer layer, from public node directories, and from what the protocol records on chain. A representative machine profile is inferred from the stated requirements for running the client software, and a power figure attached to it from laboratory measurement of equivalent hardware, counting the idle floor as well as draw under load.

The second part is the share of Ethereum's consumption attributable to what this network posts there. Ethereum is the settlement chain, so commitments, state-root proposals and any dispute traffic occupy a slice of its validator capacity, apportioned by the footprint those submissions take up. The bulk of transaction data goes instead to a separate availability layer, whose operator set is treated as a third component and estimated on the same per-node basis. Where disputes are resolved by generating cryptographic proofs, that proof generation is itself a compute cost and is counted where it occurs.

One caveat is specific to this network and material. Its architecture changed during 2026, from an independent sidechain secured by its own validator set to a Layer 2 settling on Ethereum. A reporting period that spans that change necessarily blends two different models, the earlier one counting a bonded validator set producing blocks locally and the later one counting sequencing infrastructure plus an allocated share of another chain. The generic limits apply as well: node counts and hardware mixes are inferences from public observation and stated software requirements rather than metered readings, conservative assumptions are preferred where evidence is missing, and figures are revised as the picture improves.

Pixels is present on the following networks: Ethereum, Ronin.

The renewable share reported here is a weighted average of grid mixes rather than a record of what any operator actually buys. It is produced in two steps: establish where the infrastructure sits, then attach regional electricity statistics to those places.

Location is inferred from what the network exposes publicly. Nodes advertise network addresses in order to be reachable by peers, and those addresses resolve to a country accurately enough to describe an aggregate distribution, even though any single resolution may be wrong. Crawlers of the peer-to-peer layer and public directories of hosting and staking infrastructure supply the input. Where the observable sample is too thin or too skewed to stand for the whole population, the geographic spread of a structurally similar network is substituted, chosen because its participants face comparable hardware costs and comparable pressures over where to site machines, on the reasoning that operators respond to the same commercial forces even where the software differs.

Each location is then matched to published statistics on how electricity in that country or region is generated. The renewable proportion for the network is the consumption-weighted share falling in regions where generation is renewable. Grid averages are used because the alternative, knowing each operator's actual supply contract, is not observable; an operator on a dedicated renewable supply and one drawing ordinary grid power in the same country are treated alike.

Energy intensity is reported on a different basis from total consumption. It is a marginal quantity: the additional electricity attributable to processing one further transaction on the network as it currently runs. For a network whose consumption is driven by a validator set that operates continuously regardless of how busy the chain is, that marginal figure is small, and it is not the total divided by the transaction count. The generation statistics are drawn from Share of electricity generated by renewables, compiled by Our World in Data from Ember's electricity datasets and the Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy.

The renewable share is derived from where the network's machines are, not from meters on them. Locating them means covering several distinct populations: the sequencing and proposing infrastructure the network operates, the full nodes and public endpoint servers that hold state and serve applications, the operator set of the external data availability layer, and the portion of the settlement chain's validator base carrying this network's activity. Locations are inferred from publicly observable network data, chiefly the addresses peers advertise and the hosting providers and regions to which those addresses resolve. Coverage is partial by nature; machines behind relays or content delivery networks cannot be placed.

Where a significant share of a population cannot be located directly, the geographic distribution of a network with a comparable operator profile and comparable hosting economics is used as a proxy, on the reasoning that similar incentives produce similar siting. The migration from an independent chain to a Layer 2 shifted the weighting between these populations considerably, moving a substantial part of the footprint from a locally operated validator set onto shared settlement infrastructure whose distribution is observed separately.

Each location is then matched to statistics for the electricity grid serving it, and the reported renewable share is the consumption-weighted average across those regional shares. Regional mixes move seasonally and year to year, so the figure shifts with the underlying statistics even when nothing about the network changes.

Energy intensity means something specific here: the marginal energy attributable to one additional transaction, obtained by dividing estimated consumption over a reporting period by the transactions confirmed in that period. It is an allocation of shared overhead, not a physical property of a single transaction, and on a network whose infrastructure draws power largely independently of load it falls as activity rises without any machine using less electricity. Regional generation data is taken from Share of electricity generated by renewables, compiled by Our World in Data from Ember and the Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy.

Pixels is present on the following networks: Ethereum, Ronin.

Emissions are derived from the consumption estimate rather than measured, by attaching a carbon intensity to each unit of electricity the network is estimated to draw and summing across the network.

The geographic step repeats the one used for the renewable share. Node locations are inferred from publicly observable network data, principally the addresses peers advertise so that others can connect to them, gathered by crawlers and supplemented by public information about where staking and hosting infrastructure is operated. Where that observation is too sparse to characterize the whole population, the distribution of a comparable network stands in for it, selected because its participants face similar operating economics rather than because its software resembles this one. Each region is assigned a carbon intensity, meaning the average greenhouse gas released per unit of electricity generated on that grid, expressed in carbon dioxide equivalent so that methane and the other gases are counted on a common basis. Estimated consumption in a region multiplied by that region's intensity, summed across regions, gives the network total.

The reporting separates two scopes. Scope 1 covers emissions from sources the operators of the infrastructure control directly, such as fuel burned on site in a generator. For a network of this kind, whose participants overwhelmingly run ordinary servers connected to a public grid, there is generally nothing in that category, and it is reported as such rather than left out. Scope 2 covers the indirect emissions embodied in the electricity purchased to run that infrastructure, and that is where essentially the whole footprint sits. Emissions further up the supply chain, such as those from manufacturing and shipping the hardware, fall outside this boundary.

Greenhouse gas intensity follows the same marginal logic as energy intensity: it expresses the additional emissions attributable to one further transaction rather than an average spread across all of them. Because it inherits both the consumption estimate and the grid averages, its uncertainty combines theirs. Carbon intensities are taken from Carbon intensity of electricity generation, compiled by Our World in Data from Ember's electricity datasets and the Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy, and made available under the CC BY 4.0 license.

Emissions are built on the geographic picture assembled for the energy figures, with grid carbon intensity replacing renewable share. Locations are inferred for each population that contributes: the sequencing and proposing infrastructure, the full node and public endpoint tier, the operators of the external data availability layer, and the part of the settlement chain's validator base carrying this network's activity. The inference rests on publicly observable network data, and where a population cannot be placed directly the distribution of a structurally comparable network stands in for it, with the resulting uncertainty carried into the estimate rather than concealed.

Each location is matched to the carbon intensity of the electricity on the grid serving it, expressed in grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour. The electricity estimated for that location is multiplied by the corresponding factor, and the products are summed across locations to give the network total.

What this produces is a scope 2 figure: the indirect emissions embodied in electricity bought from a grid. Scope 1 covers emissions from sources an operator controls directly, such as fuel burned on site; for a network running on general-purpose servers in commercial data centers, scope 1 is normally negligible and is reported as such unless something specific suggests otherwise. Emissions embodied in manufacturing and disposing of the hardware fall outside this boundary and are not counted, so the figure is an operational rather than a life-cycle measure.

Greenhouse gas intensity is the marginal emission attributable to one additional transaction, obtained by allocating the total across transactions confirmed in the same period. It distributes shared overhead rather than describing any individual transaction, and it moves with grid factors and hosting decisions independently of network activity. The 2026 change in architecture also reweighted which populations dominate the total, which matters for comparing periods. Grid carbon intensity values come from Carbon intensity of electricity generation, compiled by Our World in Data from Ember and the Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy and released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.