Visual identity
A 5-color pixel art system where the tardigrade's own palette changes with its on-chain state, so a profile picture visibly reports conviction.
Pixel art, framed as specimen documentation. The pixel tardigrade sits inside an editorial specimen card — natural history museum meets trading terminal. Not another suit-and-tie PFP.
Palette — 5 colors, hard limit
INK #0D0D0C background, outlines
BONE #E9E4D7 card stock, labels
HYDRATED #6FCFB0 aqueous cyan-green — plump state
TUN #C08A32 ochre-amber — vitrified state
SLATE #6B7480 mid-tone, shading, chrome
Two of the five are mechanically meaningful. A specimen's palette changes when its state changes.
State-reactive art
Token URI renders from on-chain state. This is the hook the proven collections on this chain do not have.
| State | Render |
|---|---|
| HYDRATED | Plump, all 8 legs extended, cyan-green, subtle idle motion |
| TUN | Shriveled barrel form, legs retracted, ochre, desaturated. Card overprinted CRYPTOBIOSIS — DAY 094 |
| REHYDRATING | Half-swollen mid-state. Card marked REHYDRATING — 31h REMAINING |
| STRIPPED | Corner stamped TBA EMPTY |
Your profile picture visibly reports your conviction. Someone who has been in tun for three months has a different-looking image than someone who flipped last week — permanently legible, impossible to fake, and it costs us nothing to render.
Card anatomy
┌───────────────────────────────┐
│ DSUP · SPECIMEN No. 0417 │ ← mono, small caps
│ │
│ [ pixel art ] │ ← 32×32 native, 8× nearest-neighbor
│ │
│ Ramazzottius varieornatus │ ← serif italic, real binomial
│ ENV · ANTARCTIC SUBGLACIAL │ ← mono
│ TBA · 4.20 TSLA · ×1.000 │
│ STATE · TUN — DAY 094 │ ← ochre when tun
│ SURVIVED · VACUUM ×3 │ ← only if marks exist
└───────────────────────────────┘
Zero border-radius. Hairline borders. Editorial serif for binomials, monospace for anything numeric. Nearest-neighbor scaling only — a blurred pixel is a broken pixel.
Traits
| Layer | Values |
|---|---|
| Species | 8 real species — Milnesium tardigradum, Hypsibius exemplaris, Ramazzottius varieornatus, Echiniscus testudo, Macrobiotus shonaicus, Paramacrobiotus richtersi, Halobiotus crispae, Mesobiotus philippinicus |
| Environment | Antarctic subglacial · Hydrothermal vent · Volcanic soil · Deep ocean · Low earth orbit · Lichen · Moss cushion · Desert crust |
| Claw | 6 lunule variants — drives extinction odds |
| Cuticle | 5 variants, including one 1/1200 armored |
| Anomaly | Chimeric · Albino · Twinned · Radiotrophic |
| Seed | The TBA's stock contents, surfaced as a trait |
Species is cosmetic only. Only Environment and Claw affect extinction odds — a three-axis trait matrix cannot be balanced, and an unbalanced matrix means one trait combination wins forever and the rest are dust.
Real taxonomy throughout. The credibility is free and the aesthetic is better than anything invented.
The render pipeline is a deterministic composite, not a stored image: species, environment, claw, cuticle, and anomaly layer together at request time, and state (hydrated/tun/rehydrating/stripped) is read fresh from chain on every request rather than baked in at mint — see §12 for the edge function that does this and why cache invalidation on state-change events matters more here than on almost any other art pipeline on this chain. Placoid variation was considered as a seventh trait axis and cut: it is shed and rebuilt at every molt in the real animal, which made it a poor fit for a trait meant to be permanent.