Litepaper

Table of Contents

• Litepaper
  • Summary
  • Traits
  • Mint pricing strategy
  • Appendix. GG18 Application Summary
    • Please explain how your project meets the round-specific eligibility criteria.
    • How do you measure the impact of your project? Please provide examples and/or standard metrics. This might be used in future impact reports
    • Anything else you’d like to share about your project, previous work, or other project affiliations? Anything you’d like to add that may help in determining project eligibility?

Summary

• ⚡ Learn the Japanese alphabet by owning these unique NFTs inspired by the iconic The Matrix code.
• ⚡ Choose among 2,136 common-use characters that children are taught at school (Jouyou Kanji) as well as certain uncommon characters (Hyougai Kanji).
• ⚡ Filter by school year (Rarity), number of strokes (Complexity), emotional tone (Sentiment), and use frequency (Popularity).
• ⚡ Collect your favorite characters before someone else does!
• 💥 マトリックス・コードをモチーフにした常用漢字NFTを集め、好みの学年（レアリティ）、筆順（コンプレックス）、気分（センチメント）、頻度（ポピュラリティ）で日本語を学ぶことができます！
• 🔔 At present, only unique, immutable Genesis Collection NFTs will be available.
• Matrix Jouyou launched on Solana on April 1st, 2024 (not an April Fools’ joke!)
• 🔒 Mint price is locked at SOL 1 (check current rate). See mint pricing strategy below.
• Once some NFTs are minted, they might become listed for sale on Tensor.
• 🔥 Read this promo thread to learn how to participate in a limited-time airdrop offer!
• 👋 Get in touch with the dev 📧

Matrix Jouyou Genesis Collection token address: FAWYFuq23SUfr6oGJFTuYEVwaQqsSshD3Q8aUhyYdibL

Mint Your Character

Traits

Rarity. This corresponds to the school year the kanji is taught in: 1–6 for primary school kanji (1,026 unique Genesis Collection tokens); S for secondary school kanji (1,110 Genesis Collection tokens). H for Hyougai is the highest Rarity so far (4 Genesis Collection tokens). Rarity is shown by the color of strokes.

Complexity. This equals the kanji stroke count. Median Complexity is 10.

Data for both Rarity and Complexity were downloaded from the English Wikipedia on June 9, 2022. Subsequently, they were deduplicated and refined with the assistance of ChatGPT.

Sentiment. This has been assigned to each of the kanji individually based on the combined subjective sentiment of its common meanings, from a set of six basic emotions: Happy, Sad, Anger, Fear, Surprise, and Disgust. They are apportioned approximately as 4:2:2:2:1:1. Roughly half of the tokens have Neutral Sentiment. Tokens with different Sentiment have different background colors.

Popularity is based on raw character occurrence counts from the Japanese Wikipedia as published by Dmitry Shpika. Popularity varies from zero to 1.7M occurrences, with a median of 8K occurrences.

Mint pricing strategy

As a utility NFT, the dev believes it is necessary to justify its initial pricing. The mint price is locked at SOL 1 and can never be increased due to the price locking mechanism. This amount was equivalent to ~$200 (hereinafter in USD) at the time of launch and was selected as a tradeoff between,

• affordability,
• market prices, and
• dev compensation for his time investment.

The latter is estimated at 30 hours by the time of the launch, plus 15 hours on average per each of the first 21 educational materials to develop, for a total of at least 345 hours.

At the dev’s usual hourly rate of $30, a fair launch-time compensation equals $10,350. With a $200 mint price and at least 21 completed mints, minimum sales would amount to $4,200, incurring a potential loss of $6,150 for the dev. However, if some unique holders choose to mint several tokens per wallet and the SOL price continues to rise, this might offset the loss. At the current prices, each subsequent mint will support an additional 6.7 hours of educational material development, which also seems reasonable.

Appendix. GG18 Application Summary

The dev applied for seed funding from Gitcoin Grants to the GG18 Core Round (Category: Web3 Community and Education), which took place in August 2023, but, unfortunately, was not approved. For transparency, the application summary is published here.

Please explain how your project meets the round-specific eligibility criteria.

Matrix Jouyou promotes an innovative approach to language education where Web3 is leveraged to tie up a learning objective to actually owning what you learn. By owning lovingly crafted jouyou character NFTs from the collection, learners of Japanese will have a chance to better memorize them as well as unlock unique, specially tailored educational content. Financially, by buying the tokens, the users will directly invest in developing the quality educational content they will have obtained as part of owning the NFT—a Web3 crowdfunding model of sorts. Esthetically, a unique serial graphical tune characteristic of NFT collections is certainly present in this The Matrix-inspired collection, allowing Matrix Jouyou to smoothly fit into the existing Web3 ecosystem.

It is not news that Japanese kanji characters can be rather difficult to master for native speakers of languages not based on logograms, e.g., English. If successfully funded, Matrix Jouyou presents with an opportunity to create an original, frequency-based kanji-learning project based on studying the most popular words containing a given kanji, with a specific focus on uniting various meanings and readings into one logical narrative. At the same time, the Web3-based learning flow Matrix Jouyou provides opens up an opportunity to showcase Web3 to a more general audience previously largely unfamiliar with it as well as to debunk the myth about NFTs being a Ponzi mechanism as often perceived by a Web3 outsider.

Clearly, Matrix Jouyou is focused on improving the Web3 ecosystem and popularizing it among the general audience. The project is more than a year old, which is proven by its GitHub history. Matrix Jouyou’s team has demonstrated its capacity in the Web3 space by actually creating the entire collection and launching it in the sandbox. Several test NFTs have been minted as proof-of-concept, e.g., #32 Ten Thousand, #48 Fire, or #18 Mountain. You can verify that the contact creator’s wallet is the recipient wallet of this Gitcoin grant application.

Matrix Jouyou’s long-term goals and recent milestones are specified on the collection’s website and go as follows: The long-term goal is the creation of original educational pages about each of the kanji in the collection. The recent milestone is launching the collection to mainnet and reaching 20 token holders to begin creating original educational content for the first most popular kanji. To launch the collection to mainnet, we basically need to fund gas fees, that is, about 0.1­–0.2 ETH (ca. $200­–400 DAI) given the approximate gas usage of the test contract creation transaction and rates at the time of writing.

In addition to conforming to the Web3 Community & Education Round Eligibility policy, Matrix Jouyou satisfies the general Gitcoin Rounds eligibility policy. It has a verified GitHub account, did not apply to any other core rounds except for this one, applied to only one Core Round pool, and is not involved in any of the not permitted activities. This is the first Gitcoin round Matrix Jouyou applies to.

How do you measure the impact of your project? Please provide examples and/or standard metrics. This might be used in future impact reports

The impact measures for Matrix Jouyou are as follows:

1. The percentage of NFTs sold (currently at 0%, or 0 of 2,136) shows how financially and, thus, long-term viable the project is (aiming for 100%).
2. The percentage of kanji from the collection for which educational pages have been created (currently at 0%, or 0 of 2,136) shows how productive content creation has been, which is the ultimate pragmatic value of the project (aiming for 100%).
3. The average number of NFTs from the collection held by a unique token holder (currently at 2,134) shows how the NFTs are actually being used and if there is a need for an additional supply of (non-genesis) NFTs. In theory, this metric should not fall steeply as the percentage of NFTs sold grows because upon learning the kanji they bought users should need to acquire other kanji (which, in turn, should necessitate minting of additional collections).
4. The number of mentions on news outlets and non-affiliated social media (currently at zero) will show how good the general audience uptake of the project has been.

Anything else you’d like to share about your project, previous work, or other project affiliations? Anything you’d like to add that may help in determining project eligibility?

I am deeply saddened each time I share my ideas about Web3 implementation of a Web2 project with a person, to which they respond with suspicion and concerns about ‘crypto fraud’. It is especially regretful when NFTs are perceived as unnecessary Ape-ish images created only for hype, with no appreciation of blockchains as a technology to own a digital asset whatsoever. Matrix Jouyou is my first take at actually joining the beauty of Web3 and a rather massively oriented, casual educational project. My strong belief lies in the idea that the more ‘casual’, non-crypto-oriented projects begin to implement Web3 technologies, the more the Web3 space will flourish. In fact, I come from a non-crypto background myself (as a former physician and current academic health researcher, medical writer, and translator) but have acquired Web3 skills and look forward to implementing them more and more in my professional activities.