PixelMap

PixelMap is a decentralized pixel art billboard on the Ethereum blockchain, heavily inspired by Alex Tew's The Million Dollar Homepage (2005). Created by developer Ken Erwin as a side project to sharpen his Solidity skills, PixelMap went live on November 17, 2016 — years before the ERC-721 NFT standard would be proposed.

The contract manages a grid of 3,969 purchasable 16x16 pixel tiles (plus one hidden tile), totaling 1,016,064 pixels on a 1,296 x 784 grid. Each tile was initially priced at 2 ETH (approximately $20 at the time of deployment). Unlike The Million Dollar Homepage, where only the site creator could update tiles, PixelMap's smart contract gives tile owners full control: they can update the tile's image, change the URL it points to, or set a sale price — all without any central authority.

Notably, PixelMap stores image data directly on-chain within each tile's struct, making it one of the earliest projects to put visual data permanently on the Ethereum blockchain. The original contract uses a simple mapping-based ownership model that predates ERC-721 by over a year.

The project was largely forgotten after its 2016 launch, with only about 20-30 tiles purchased in its first years. A contemporaneous Gitter chat room from December 2016 shows early community discussion about tile pricing. The project was rediscovered in August 2021 by NFT historian Adam McBride, who recognized its historical significance. The rediscovery story was later featured on This American Life (Episode 769: The Reluctant Explorer), bringing mainstream attention to the archaeology of early Ethereum contracts.

PixelMap is widely recognized as the second-oldest NFT project on Ethereum, after Etheria (October 2015), and is among a small handful of pre-ERC-721 NFT artifacts that survive from Ethereum's earliest era.