999 genesis strays, each one drawn by the chain itself.
A stray is drawn from the seed it was minted with, by a drawing program that lives on the chain. There is no image file: open a token and your browser draws the cat, line by line, the same way every time. Feed two of them niboshi and they have kittens, which carry what their parents kept hidden.
The whole drawing engine is on the chain: the brush, the wash, the paper, the anatomy, the genes. A token's page is a small document that carries that engine and one seed; the browser unpacks it and draws. Nothing is uploaded afterwards and nothing can go missing, so the picture is the same on every screen, for as long as the chain runs.
The seed is fixed at the moment of minting, from the block and the minter's address. No one picks a cat, and no one can see it before it is minted. Every cat is drawn on its own sheet of washi, fibres and all.
Two looks, one cat. A stray is drawn in ink and wash or in kawaii, and which one it shows is a gene, ink dominant. Every genesis stray shows ink; about two in five carry kawaii hidden, and when two carriers meet, a kitten can take it.
A stray carries two copies of each coat gene, one from each parent, the way real cats do. A dominant copy shows when it is there; a recessive one hides until two copies meet, which can take generations.
The 999 genesis strays show only the coats of a Japanese back street: black, brown mackerel tabby, orange tabby toms and tortoiseshell queens, with white from none to mittens, grown or old, in six street poses and four moods. The rest they carry without showing it: chocolate and cinnamon, the dilutes blue, lilac and cream, colourpoint, green and hazel eyes, the kawaii look, and in about a third of them a hidden hue of paint.
When two carriers meet, it surfaces. Each of these kittens is the child of two genesis strays that show none of it:
Some things no genesis stray carries at all: silver, white, ticked and spotted tabbies, folded ears, odd eyes and a second tail come only by mutation, one gene copy in five hundred at every birth, or from the rare niboshi below. Every white or silver cat there will ever be traces back to one of those.
Kittens are fed, not bought. NIBOSHI is the strays' second collection: 9,001 bundles of dried fish, each its own drawing in ink on washi, at 0.003 ETH. One niboshi feeds one kitten, and its kind decides what that kitten gets.
Every niboshi is minted blind, at one price. Its kind is drawn at the mint from the block and its number, out of what is left of each kind, so the counts below are exact to the last fish: there will be ten nekomata bundles, and one maneki, once.
Every kitten carries its parents and its generation in its token, so every stray's family can be read back to the genesis strays and drawn as a scroll: the founders at the top, each generation below the one it came from.
A gold niboshi, kin, makes the tree matter. Name any cat in the pair's family, the queen, the tom or an ancestor up to eight generations back, and the kitten is born with that cat's genes, under a seed of its own: a genesis stray returns, or a rare great-grandparent. Above, the second generation's kin kitten is its genesis grandmother, #212, again.
The first cat to show a trait founds a line: the house of the first silver, the first lilac, the first nekomata. A genesis stray's standing is the number of its descendants, and since nobody leaves, every one of them counts.
A genesis stray costs 0.03 ETH, a niboshi 0.003 ETH, both on OpenSea. Breeding costs the niboshi and nothing else, and the parents stay yours. Two percent of every resale comes back as royalties.
| genesis strays | 999 |
| niboshi, one kitten each | 9,001 |
| strays, at most | 10,000 |
A niboshi never makes two kittens and never makes none, so there can never be more than 999 + 9,001 strays. Nobody leaves: every trait reads as its share of all the strays there are.
On the chain: the drawing engine and every token's page, the paper and the brush, the genes and the cross, every niboshi's kind and what it does to a kitten, the parents and the generation of every cat, and the hours they take to grow up and to rest. A genesis stray's genes come from its seed; a kitten's genes, birth and parents are written into its token. Nothing about a stray lives anywhere else.