We think most pfp backgrounds aren’t intentional enough in this regard, and instead we see many projects prioritize matching color palettes, or just opt for simplicity in their backgrounds (as we did with the default / plain backgrounds for Citizens of Tajigen at mint).

A couple of months ago we published our note on a new kind of currency, describing how we’ve created a scarce ecosystem resource, in the form of art drops. Two art drops have already taken place, corresponding to Tajigen holder snapshots. What follows is the first use case for our art drops.

TLDR for those who don’t want to read this entire post:

Citizens of Tajigen are anonymous netrunners from many different backgrounds: athletes, hackers, scientists and soldiers, who have come together to fulfill a common goal: to bring back decentralization and free the people trapped in the new world order.

Tajigen holders can now burn art drops to customize & upgrade their Citizens of Tajigen with deflationary backgrounds from known & upcoming artists. Each background will only exist in a limited quantity because of the scarce nature of our art drops, and overwriting an existing background burns the old one forever.

We’ve implemented a handful of innovations in structuring the mechanisms behind this, and welcome any other NFT projects who’d like to use our system, along with TinyERC721, to do so.

Customizing your Citizen of Tajigen

Today we launch a new part of The Shelter experience, where you can customize & upgrade your Tajigen characters with custom, deflationary backgrounds from known & upcoming artists.

Via this experience, you are able to burn your art drops, then claim and apply available backgrounds to your Tajigen characters. Each background has been hand created by a known or upcoming artist, and has a story or place in the world we’ve created. Click in to each background to learn a bit more about it, and then ask yourself: what does this setting & background say about you, citizen?

Before and after shot of a Tajigen receiving their shiny new background:

The process of burning an art drop, then claiming & applying a background is simple & easy. As with our original mint contract (TinyERC721), we’ve applied a number of gas optimization techniques to keep gas expenditure to a minimum.

Once a new background has been applied, you’ll be able to see it almost immediately on OpenSea and other marketplaces:

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xb000a4933107033a4e5483a1576eda178f769508/1116

Collaborating with known & upcoming artists

As you browse & apply backgrounds, you’ll notice they’ve been created by different artists. Some artists like Tyler Foust (creator of Reddit x Foustlings) and Rojom (creator of Reddit x The Senses) and REDACTED are known and their existing works are in high demand, others are upcoming & aspiring. We look forward to revealing more partner artists and backgrounds incrementally over time.

If you’re an artist and would like to have your work integrated with the Citizens of Tajigen, we’ll soon share more about the process to get involved. In the meantime, feel free to contact one of our co-founders, Vlad or Rob to start a conversation.

More things we’ve done differently

We’ve been working on this feature for our holders for a while, and aren’t the first NFT collection to offer changeable backgrounds. But we are the first to do a few things differently, and in our view, these changes lead to a better user experience and game theory:

1. We’ll be collaborating with new artists & projects on a rolling basis, to make new backgrounds available over time. Some of these may be tied to special ecosystem events.

2. Some backgrounds will require the combination of multiple different art drops to be burned, rewarding long term Tajigen holders over the course of 2023.

3. Backgrounds themselves aren’t a tradeable collection, and once a background has been applied to a Tajigen, it will be bound to & sold with the NFT, potentially increasing its resale value.

4. You can apply new backgrounds to the same character, but in doing so, any previously applied backgrounds will be written over, and lost forever. This means first generation backgrounds will potentially become more scarce over time, per the thesis we laid out in a new kind of currency.

5. And finally: swap protection, an elegantly simple solution to the problem of background swapping during sales/transfers.

Swap protection // full context: There is a theoretical risk (albeit low) that a bad-actor selling a listed Tajigen may overwrite their background with a different one before, say, accepting a bid offer. This would leave the buyer to receive a Tajigen with a different background to what they intended to buy. So we’ve implemented a revert function. (NB: although the risk is low here, this can of course be applied to scenarios where the risk is higher)

The way the revert function works is simple: every Tajigen NFT has a grace period of 10 minutes (note this time period can be customized, and we may extend it to an hour, or several hours) to revert a newly applied background, irrespective of whether the owner of the NFT has changed.

Similarly to how tweets now give you a grace period to edit them, if you apply a background, you have 10 minutes to unapply the background if you change your mind. This also offers new buyers a protective mechanism to ensure they receive the background they thought they were going to when they purchased it.

It’s worth noting that up until this point, the risk of this scenario has largely gone unaddressed by other projects, with most approaches basically extending the ERC721 standard with an event that indicates a change of token. This entire approach relies on marketplaces to adopt this standard, and to cancel listings when a change is detected. Ofcourse, marketplaces still haven’t adopted this, and so the risk is present for these other projects using dynamic NFTs.

As we continue to see more projects move towards dynamic & customizable NFTs, it’s important that the ecosystem has a makeshift solution like ours to offer buyers a safety net, until marketplaces offer proper in-built support.

FAQs

➜ Why are backgrounds not tradeable as NFTs?

Backgrounds (in the form of ERC1155 tokens) introduce upgradability / customizability to our genesis collection, the Citizens of Tajigen. Their primary purpose is to be applied to your citizen, augmenting / enhancing their aesthetic and value.

Backgrounds become accessible by burning (or later, combining) art drops that our holders receive.

➜ So how do I access a background relating to an art drop that I missed?

Whilst backgrounds aren’t tradeable themselves, art drops are! Browse the Tajigen art drop collections in order to purchase the art drops you may need to acquire a certain background.

➜ How do we select & apply backgrounds?

Head over to the background claim page to browse available backgrounds. Clicking in to each one will tell you a bit more about the background and who created it. It’ll also show you the burn requirements to claim it. Once you’ve claimed a background, you will be able to choose which Citizen of Tajigen in your wallet you’d like to apply it to.

We will be adding more claimable backgrounds on a rolling basis as they are created by our collaborating artists, and remember: once a background is applied, it can only be overwritten! This is by design, so that gen 1 backgrounds become more scarce over time, perhaps some even become 1/1s through the overwriting process.

➜ I’m an artist. Can I create a background to be included?

Yes, we’d love to meet you and learn more about your art. Please feel free to contact one of our co-founders, Vlad or Rob to start a conversation.

➜ Will other traits later be upgradable?

Who knows ;) … Our advice is the same as always: follow the signal.

Links

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We now know these early primitives usually don’t perform well: inflationary tokens trend to zero over time, and as their perceived value diminishes, so usually does the core collection and brand.

We need a new kind of currency.

TLDR for those who don’t want to read this entire post:

➜ A new kind of currency: art.

➜ Regular / irregular free art drops (ERC-1155) with different rarity tiers.

➜ Claimable amount of drops depends on # of Citizen of Tajigen NFTs you hold.

➜ Each drop may fulfil a different purpose / be redeemed against different benefits.

➜ Benefits can be accessed by burning your drop, to: customize your NFT, receive signed prints, redacted, redacted, reeeedacted and other things we build.

➜ In the future, your drop rarity may be programmatically augmented by your community contributions (we’ll be doing some things with Discord / Twitter).

This ecosystem economy is deflationary by design. There are no bad decisions to be made, only trade-offs and different rewards.

Some details follow below.

Economic engineering

When designing an ecosystem economy in web3, an architect must consider:

1/- participation rate: the percentage of people interested enough in the economy to participate in it, through staking or whatever mechanism is in place to earn currency. This is often only discovered by surprise in real time, with little to no prior modeling.

2/- expenditure rate: the speed at which people cash in their currency for what’s being offered in return. This is often left to chance or misjudged.

3/- price-based & time-based decision making: holders have profit targets and over-time become more likely to evaluate the opportunity cost of rotating their liquidity elsewhere.

4/- rogue and bad actors: some people just want to watch the world burn. Irrational and bad actors can hold an economy hostage or otherwise materially influence others, by creating unwarranted fud, looking for exploits, and so on.

For these reasons & others we see most web3 ecosystem economies fail, stagnate, or otherwise run into issues over the long term. It’s simply not good enough to use staking to artifically reduce supply and/or to launch a shitcoin and hope for the best.

Scarce by design

First principles matter. The simplest way to engineer an economy for success is to ensure its currency remains scarce, and in careful equilibrium against demand. This is where many passive & active staking NFTs are fundamentally flawed, having committed to an ever-expanding supply based on a single parameter: time.

By keeping currency supply scarce, and regularly providing an outlet for currency to be “cashed in” (i.e. burned) it becomes easier for an architect to adjust levers in real time, to tweak the grand experiment based on context, and to ensure currency value trends up and to the right.

A new kind of currency

SEC got you sweatin anon? Np, it’s time for a new kind of currency: free art.

Specifically, art in the form of ERC-1155 NFTs (art drops) that can be claimed & burned for other benefits, increasing the scarcity of each drop as its burned. The cadence, drop volume, and burning options keeps this dynamic interesting, perhaps even unpredictable, and presents you with options beyond the typical ‘hold or sell’.

For a burgeoning economy, a thoughtfully moderated & deflationary currency is the simplest approach to value creation.

How it works

Intermittent snapshots will be taken of wallets holding our genesis NFTs: the Citizens of Tajigen. Depending on the # of Citizen of Tajigen NFTs the wallet holds, art drops created by our founding artist Nao can be claimed via The Shelter portal on our website.

You may recall we posted ‘owning multiple Citizens of Tajigen in the same wallet will give you the best outcome’, which refers to multipliers in effect & different rarities depending on the amount of NFTs you hold.

It’s possible in the future that some snapshots won’t be announced in advance.

First claim

Our first art drop has two different rarity tiers, and will be live for our holders shortly. Details of the tiers / multipliers will be shared when the art drop goes live.

Burning & benefits

To access what comes next in our ecosystem, you’ll need to burn your art drops. Some art drops will be redeemable against specific benefits, so each drop carries its own redemption utility, and some will be combinable.

That’s it for now. Follow the signal.

Links

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What are ENS domains?

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a distributed, open, and extensible naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain. ENS's job is to map human-readable names like 'alice. eth' to machine-readable identifiers such as Ethereum addresses, other cryptocurrency addresses, content hashes, and metadata.

TLDR: You can choose a domain name ending with .eth that leads to a wallet of your choice. Alice could choose alice.eth for example. Every domain has to be unique.

More info: https://docs.ens.domains/

What are ENS subdomains?

The owner of an ENS domain can configure subdomains as desired. This is achieved by creating a subdomain and setting its owner to the desired address - this can be the same as the owner of the parent domain, or any other address.

TLDR: Alice can create an unlimited amount of subdomains like iam.alice.eth or whothefis.alice.eth for her domain alice.eth. She can also allow other people to create subdomains using her parent domain alice.eth.

More info: https://docs.ens.domains/dapp-developer-guide/managing-names#creating-subdomains

What are tokenbound ENS subdomains?

Subdomains can be tied to NFTs which means that they follow the NFT in case that it is being transferred/sold/etc. The same way a token can be “soulbound” to your wallet, it can be “soulbound” to an NFT (= “tokenbound”).

TLDR: Your NFT owns the subdomain. When the NFT is being traded/transferred, the subdomain is being traded/transferred with it due to being tokenbound.

Why are we telling you all this?

Holders of Citizens of Tajigen NFTs can now create tokenbound subdomains using tajigen.eth. Choose your favorite Citizens of Tajigen NFT, think of a name you like and create a tajigen.eth subdomain.

For example: VladTheRuler created a subdomain called vlad.tajigen.eth tokenbound to the Citizens of Tajigen NFT with the token ID 3625. Read on to see how he did it.

How do I create a tokenbound tajigen.eth subdomain?

1// Go to this etherscan link and connect the wallet containing your Citizens of Tajigen NFT.

2// Go to claimSubdomain and enter the following values:

• payableAmount (ether): 0

• ensId: 0xcf17edf93cdd08868fdf5e63563c00451a1284c53b50492d573669bb0eb1ec61 This is the ENS ID of tajigen.eth

• nftId: The token ID of your Citizens of Tajigen NFT which you can find in the details section of your NFT on OpenSea

• nftContract: 0xb000a4933107033a4e5483a1576eda178f769508 This is the Citizens of Tajigen contract address

• label: The subdomain you want to claim. VladTheRuler had to enter vlad to get vlad.tajigen.eth

3// Confirm in MetaMask.

That is it. The Citizens of Tajigen subdomain of your choice is now tokenbound to the Citizens of Tajigen NFT of your choice.

⚠️ Note: Uppercase letters in subdomains seem finicky / may break stuff. If you have trouble completing the subdomain registration process, try using all lowecase.

⚠️ Note: Tokenbound subdomains don't provide you with an NFT like ENS domains usually do. We will later be introducing an easy mechanism to check whether whether a Tajigen NFT has already had an ens subdomain tokenbound to it.

How do I set up my tokenbound tajigen.eth subdomain as my primary ENS domain?

1// Go to https://app.ens.domains/ and connect your wallet (upper left corner).

2// Go to "My Account" (upper right corner).

3// Click on “Primary ENS Name (reverse record)” and select the tokenbound Citizens of Tajigen subdomain, click save and confirm the transaction in MetaMask.

That is it. Now your Citizens of Tajigen subdomain leads directly to your wallet.

⚠️ Note: If you trade the Citizens of Tajigen NFT connected to the subdomain, the new holder will have control over the subdomain.

Your Citizen of Tajigen NFT now has a tokenbound tajigen.eth subdomain. Nice.

Why should I do any of this?

The process described above can be done in under 1minute. You may want to give it a go for the following reasons:

• Maybe you found your “forever Citizen of Tajigen” and want to give them a unique “name” / subdomain.

• Maybe you have a great idea for a subdomain that you want to use to be able to sell your Citizens of Tajigen NFT for a higher price.

• Maybe you want to show a deeper connection to the Citizens of Tajigen project.

• Maybe the Citizens of Tajigen team has plans to reward every wallet using a Citizens of Tajigen subdomain.

• Maybe you’ve thought of an even more exciting reason than these examples here ;)

Credit: big h/t to hodl.pcc.eth who built the tool enabling the claim of these subdomains. Thank you for what you’re doing to drive the space forward.

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Because tiny optimizations at scale can make a huge difference.

Why gas optimization matters

To open with a bit of a trope: it’s still incredibly early in web3, and in NFTs especially. If you’re an active market participant at this point in time, you are without a shadow of a doubt, an innovator - the earliest users on the left extremity of the user adoption graph.

Being early is generally really fun if you’re innately curious & love trying things out before they become mainstream, but with new technologies it often means you have to put up with stuff like rough edges, bugs and inefficiencies.

Probably the biggest economic inefficiency (on a protocol / infra level) facing the burgeoning ethereum NFT ecosystem is excessive gas expenditure.

Although ethereum transaction volume has dropped in recent months, several thousands of ETH are still burned through gas fees every day. During the bull market in the second half of 2021, and in early 2022, we’d frequently burn between 5,000 - 10,000 ether per day, with NFTs making up ~30% of gas usage.

Putting this into perspective, the month of January 2022 alone saw more ETH burned than the entire lifetime OS trading volume of Doodles & Azuki combined. It’s important we recognise the significance of this, and how much better off we’d be if this volume was retained as ecosystem liquidity, rather than being burned away into the ether (excuse the pun).

The good news is: there’s something we can do about it.

Adopting more gas-efficient contracts can help save the NFT ecosystem hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. Optimizing for gas-efficiency benefits traders and creators alike, as ETH that’s not burnt remains available as ecosystem liquidity, likely increasing trading volumes, floor prices and other growth rates.

The state of contracts

Thankfully, we’ve seen many projects move towards more gas-efficient NFT contracts, but.. (yes, there’s unfortunately a but here) most existing optimizations shift the gas overhead from the time of mint to future token transfers. So, whilst these changes are valuable in reducing gas-wars & excessive gas expenditure at the time of minting, they don’t always result in a net reduction of gas consumption in the long term.

By examining several existing optimization techniques, we challenged ourselves to achieve the best of both worlds: to minimize gas consumption at mint time AND reduce gas consumption in the long term.

History, context & our approach

Before we look at TinyERC721, let’s look at what contributes to gas and others who have paved the way to date.

The most important factor contributing to the gas usage of a transaction is data storage. In order to store a piece of data on-chain, you need to pay 20,000 gas for 32 bytes of storage space. With ETH at ~$1,000 and gas at 50 gwei, this corresponds to $1 (although, painful reminder, this is the lowest ETH price we’ve seen in the last 12 months).

Reducing the amount of data stored on-chain has therefore been the main focus of several gas optimization techniques we’ve seen recently.

Initially, many NFT projects used the OpenZeppelin ERC721Enumerable base contract. This contract is optimized for efficient data retrieval and provides mechanisms to efficiently retrieve the list of tokens owned by a wallet. In order to do this, it needs to store several extra pieces of data, which significantly increases the gas cost for every mint and transfer of a token. While this trade-off may be justifiable in some scenarios, the majority of NFT contracts do not require efficient on-chain token enumeration, and this extra storage space is essentially wasted.

This prompted many projects that followed to choose the OpenZeppelin ERC721 base contract which dropped support for efficient token enumeration. Removing enumerable support reduces the gas cost of minting and transferring tokens by more than 50%, but means that you either need to loop through the entire collection to retrieve the list of tokens owned by a particular wallet, or depend on off-chain indexing mechanisms. This is essentially a trade-off between write-efficiency and read-efficiency. As you don’t need to pay for gas when you only need to read data from the blockchain, it is often favorable to optimize for write-efficiency.

When a token is minted using the OpenZeppelin ERC721 base contract, the owner of each newly minted token is stored (token #42 is owned by wallet 0x123..89, token #43 is owned by wallet 0x123..89, etc) and the balance of the token owner is stored (wallet 0x123..89 owns 5 tokens). Both of these have been the focus of newer gas optimization techniques.

Whilst the official NFT specs do not define any behavior around token IDs when minting, a very common approach is to sequentially assign token IDs using an internal counter that keeps track of the number of minted tokens. This enables the batch minting optimization technique used in the ERC721A base contract by Azuki.

The main innovation of ERC721A is to store the token owner only once per batch. Let’s say I mint 5 tokens (token #42 up to #46), instead of storing my wallet address 5 times as the owner of each individual token, ERC721A will store my wallet address only once for token #42 and leave the owner of the following tokens blank. This means that, in order to determine the owner of a token, you move backwards through the list of tokens until you find a non-blank token owner. This does mean however that gas costs are shifted from minting to future token transfers, during which these blank spaces are gradually filled in.

Another approach, used by Mason and Chance in the Nuclear Nerds contract, eliminates the need to store the token balances by dynamically calculating this only when needed. This results in the lowest possible gas cost for minting a single token and also optimizes the gas cost of subsequent token transfers.

TinyERC721 builds on top of both techniques to optimize gas usage in both individual mints and token transfers, as well as when minting multiple tokens in a single batch. In combination with a number of other techniques such as data packing, reducing storage reads and eliminating redundant overflow checks (all of which we’ll discuss in future articles), TinyERC721 reduces the gas usage of ERC721A by another ~30%.

A look at the numbers

We’re excited to see how TinyERC721 performs in a live mint - we’ll know shortly as we’re using it to launch the Citizens of Tajigen on 22nd July. Till then, here are the gas figures from tests we’ve recently run.

Restrictions & assumptions

As is often the case in software engineering, there are always trade-offs between various implementations. Our implementation makes a number of assumptions to enable the optimization techniques we are using. If these assumptions do not hold for your specific use-case, other ERC721 implementations may be a better fit. As always, DYOR on the optimal contract to use and avoid blindly copy-pasting code or using a contract ‘just because X other team did so’. Following our opening blurb, we do believe that - generally speaking - optimizing for gas-efficiency is the right approach in the vast majority of scenarios.

With that said, here are some things to consider if using TinyERC721:

1. Token IDs are assigned sequentially to newly minted tokens. This is the assumption that enables the ERC721A batch-minting optimization. Whilst this holds true for the vast majority of NFT projects, some projects (like LOOT) let you choose which token ID to mint.

2. The list of tokens owned by a specific address does not need to be queried on-chain. This is what enables us to eliminate the extra storage requirements of ERC721Enumerable.

3. Token balances do not need to be queries on-chain. This is what enables the Mason Chance optimization.

4. The number of tokens in a collection is restricted by some upper limit. Certain ethereum gateways such as infura, which is the default gateway used by Metamask, enforce a gas limit on read operations to prevent DDoS attacks. Calculating your token balance (even though it’s a read-only operation which doesn’t require you to pay for gas) will loop through the entire collection. This means that, if your collection were to start approaching 100,000 tokens, it might not be possible to query token balances through infura as it runs into this limit. This shouldn’t be a problem for the vast majority of collections that we see today (often 10,000 tokens or less), but it means that TinyERC721 may not be suited for future collections aimed at containing significantly more tokens.

Both #2 and #3 above limit the information that is efficiently available on-chain. While there are scenarios, such as staking or token-gating, in which this information might be needed, this can usually be replaced by retrieving this data off-chain and passing in arguments that can efficiently be verified on-chain. For example, in the context of token-gating, instead of checking the balance of the caller on-chain, you could pass in a token ID that is owned by the caller as an argument to the token-gated method, which can then efficiently be verified on-chain.

Thanks & what’s next

My co-founders and I are grateful for every builder in the space who turns up daily to think, tinker and toil to help us raise the bar collectively, and move the space forward. The work I have done on TinyERC721 is a humble extension of the efforts that others have already made. I have no greater wish than for the community to continue building upon it, so that together, we create the best future possible.

wkm, co-founder & lead eng, Citizens of Tajigen.

Want to get in touch? Hit me up in Tajigen discord or via twitter DM.

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Building a brand on the blockchain.

Operating Principles

❏ Hyper-focus on GSD (getting shit done). We are an execution-oriented team with an undying bias for action. We build with urgency and conviction. We will set a leading example in the space with the quality & consistency of our delivery.

❏ Do what hasn’t been done before. Web3 will only move forward if teams are brave enough to experiment, to push the boundaries of existing ideas and try new things. We are deeply thoughtful and fearlessly creative. We are the tip of the spear.

❏ We haven’t won yet. Web3 is in an echo chamber where it can feel like success is guaranteed. It isn’t. We’re still incredibly early. We haven’t won yet applies to web3 as much as it is our own ethos. Our work is never done, infact, we’re just getting started.

Community

❏ The Shelter: Being a Citizen of Tajigen provides access to The Shelter, a globally connected underground network. A place where we learn, plan, collaborate, and build, to progress the future of web3 and DeFi.

❏ A story driven experience: The Tajigen story will unfold over time – with our community squarely at the helm. Experiential mechanisms shall give our holders steering power over major story points that influence the overall arc. Together, we follow the signal.

❏ A platform for builders: A community incubator and equity-free grants program shall be launched to back eligible teams & projects being built in The Shelter. Two tracks are being explored: Tajigen related projects and original IP & utility-based projects.

Digital Identity

❏ Partnerships: There are others out there who share our ideas and values, who we’ll selectively partner with in the months & years ahead. We’re particularly interested in non-obvious opportunities: brands & technologies that we see playing a critical role in the web3 ecosystem over the coming 10 years.

❏ Access pass: Via network partners, your Citizen of Tajigen will act as an access pass to a curated list of tools, resources and communities that supplement your digital identity and lifestyle.

❏ REDACTED: Highly experimental ideas that explore what identity means today and what it’ll mean tomorrow. What does the future of identity management look like if we’re avatars? What can our avatar hold on our behalf? How should this evolve over time? We’re exploring a number of product concepts that leverage NFT technology to answer these questions.

Interoperable Ecosystem

❏ Future drops: When the time is right the Citizens of Tajigen ecosystem will be expanded with further drops for our holders. Drops will play a role in fulfilling our brand & storytelling objectives, as well as expanding our reach and accessibility.

❏ Story-driven tech innovation: Our ecosystem will be fused together through technical innovation that ties into our brand & the story of the Citizens of Tajigen. Through this we’ll ship tooling that benefits the wider ecosystem.

Metaverse x Realverse

❏ Tajigen gear: Tajigen gearsmiths create the dopest shit in the metaverse, and that’s not just apparel. Citizens will be able to equip themselves with real world items that enable and amplify the Tajigen lifestyle.

❏ IRL Shelter experience: Experience what it feels like to be part of a globally connected underground network, IRL. Citizens will be able to access exclusive meetups, parties, and other events.

❏ REDACTED: Plenty of metaverses out there, plenty of 3D avatars, not enough big bets on what the future will actually look like and how the ownership of a digital asset can bridge the gap between these multiverses. We’re thinking about this differently.

TLDR: Build a brand on the blockchain. Tell a story. Ship cool shit. Do the unexpected. Make a difference. And do it all with you, the community.

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# Prelude

The year is 2025

The world's governments and largest financial institutions pass legislation outlawing cryptocurrencies. A coalition of monopolistic ISPs establish a new internet protocol, requiring the centralisation of all web services. Building on the blockchain is illegal.

The population is microchipped. All monetary transactions occur in fiat. These conditions enable the banks to exert maximum control over our economies and lives.

Any non-compliant persons are targeted for arrest and re-education.

Against this stand the Citizens of Tajigen

The Citizens of Tajigen are an underground network of anonymous netrunners: artists, athletes, hackers, mentalists, scientists and soldiers, who work to fulfill a common goal: to bring back decentralization and free the people trapped in the new world order.

# Manifesto

The future holds incredible potential, but we haven’t won yet.

We are building Citizens of Tajigen for the self aware, the curious, and the non-conformists: the thinkers, builders and changemakers at the forefront of web3 and DeFi.

Our mission is to grow an authentic digital identity brand for people passionate about blockchain technology and the progress it enables.

Representing yourself digitally as a Citizen of Tajigen says much about you and your beliefs. It is a knowing look, a tip of the hat, a secret handshake that says: we're here to build the best future possible.

# Team

nao: Published Japanese manga artist. Studied at the New York Fashion Institute of Technology - widely regarded as the #1 Fashion school in the world (alumni includes Calvin Klein, Carolina Herrera, Michael Kors, etc). She has worked as an illustrator and web designer for 15+ years.

Vlad: COO @ a leading European legaltech firm, servicing clients such as Ernst & Young, Baker McKenzie and many others. A seasoned operator who has led complex international projects, often delivering under tight time constraints and with limited resources.

Rob: Former digital community lead @ Shopify, now transitioning into a strategic role at Islands.xyz. Rob is known to many via his Reddit alias - Gallowboob via which he accrued the most karma points of all time and managed & grew communities from scratch. Rob specializes in digital strategy and growth.

Dith: Former funded startup founder. Built companies up to $7-figures in annual revenue and built product for: MasterCard, Samsung, Sony, Visa, among dozens of other Fortune 500 customers. Presently leading partnerships at one of the world's largest fintechs.

wkm: Former senior full-stack developer and technical team leader @ Square. Has written & shipped code for products used by millions of users worldwide. Previously a SaaS indiehacker.

Extended team: creatives & talent who've worked with & for the likes of Disney, Netflix, Cyberpunk2077, Evangelion & many others.

Iconography & Brand

The Tajigen logomark incorporates the Japanese kanji ( 多 次 元 ) in a block representative of the blockchain. The word Tajigen means multidimensional in Japanese. It is as much a call for a decentralised future as it is a celebration of our diversity, and humanity.

Art

All of our art is hand drawn by our founding artist, Nao. Nao has been creating art since childhood and began her career as a web designer, before becoming a published manga artist in Japan.

Today she works full-time as an illustrator, creating the Citizens of Tajigen.

Links

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