How the chicken was made
Real 3D, built by hand, verified by machine. No prerendered video, no AI-generated images: a rigged character running live in your browser, reading its own market and feeling things about it.
01
The vision
The world’s first dynamic coin mascot: one character whose body, mood and behavior are functions of its coin’s market cap. It hatches at $5K, grows through eleven forms, dies and rises at $7M, is rebuilt in chrome at $10M, and becomes something else entirely at $15M. Every price movement triggers an emotional reaction, live, on a real rig.
02
The 3D pipeline
Every model is built in Blender with clean topology and a shared skeleton, exported as glTF and streamed into the browser. Eleven forms; nine of them share one 60-bone rig, so a performance authored once can be re-performed by any body.
03
The rig
60 deform bones: 3 spine, 3 neck, an articulated beak, 3 comb segments, twin wattles, independent eyes with 4 eyelids, wings with 5 feather bones each, legs with IK and planted feet, 3 toes and a spur per foot, and 5 individually controllable tail feathers. Driver systems handle the automatic life: the comb lags head tilt, the feathers fan with wing spread.
04
The face
41 facial morph targets, 7 blended emotion mixes and 23 named expression presets, from “Big Smile” to “Dead Inside”. If you cannot tell what the chicken is feeling in a single frame, the expression failed review.
05
The animation library
600+ hand-authored clips. A happiness ladder (7 levels, ending in researched money dances: the floss, the Carlton, the griddy, the robot, and each tier’s signature — the zombie does Thriller and its arm falls off mid-dance). A sadness ladder (10 levels, from a drooping comb to the fetal position). A resurrection ladder ending in the phoenix. Seven locomotion states from a jog to a screaming freefall. 36 market reactions per tier, 16+ transformation cinematics, and a personality per form: the terminator’s robot is not a dance, it is its resting language.
06
The tiers
| $5K – $100K | the egg | the hatch story: 17 persistent states from a still egg to a standing chick |
| $100K – $200K | the chick | a round fluff ball with a shell hat and too much energy |
| $200K – $450K | the young rooster | gangly adolescence: half fluff, half feather, all enthusiasm |
| $450K – $800K | the mature rooster | the hero form: golden hackle cape, full comb, real dignity to lose |
| $800K – $1M | the super rooster | the power-up: glowing eyes, energy pulses, heroic posture |
| $1M – $2M | the golden rooster | every feather luminous gold, floating, serene |
| $2M – $3M | the ice elemental | crystalline body over a molten core, cold precision |
| $3M – $7M | the cosmic entity | a nebula wearing the silhouette of a rooster |
| $7M – $10M | the zombie | the death and the rise: one green eye, parts that fall off and get put back |
| $10M – $15M | the terminator | the rebuild as technology: chrome, sensors, deployable arsenal |
| $15M+ | the omega | everything at once; the story extends past $20M on data alone |
07
The brain
36 market events ranked by a priority ladder (a new all-time high interrupts everything). Freshness budgets drop stale events rather than reacting late. A mood machine keeps big feelings alive for minutes, not seconds. A quirk timer fires unprompted behaviors when nothing is happening. A velocity tracker turns momentum into locomotion. Reaction time is asserted under two seconds by the release gate.
08
The data
Live reads from Robinhood Chain through Alchemy with DexScreener failover, WebSocket whale detection, bonding-curve pricing before graduation and pool pricing after, one and five minute candles, and a persistent all-time-high memory: load the page below the peak and it remembers what it once was.
09
The proof
Nothing on this page is taken on faith. A self-verification harness sweeps the market cap from $5K to $20M in $1,000 steps — 19,996 increments — asserting the right tier, the right sub-stage, a living animation and zero console errors at every one. Every tier crossing, all 36 events, the whale toast lifecycle, RPC failover, first-launch state and the mobile viewport are verified in a real browser on every release. The current gate: 347/347 assertions, 0 failures.
10
The stack
Next.js · React Three Fiber · drei · postprocessing · zustand · lightweight-charts · ethers + Alchemy SDK · Tailwind · Blender 4.5 (all 3D) · a 60-bone shared rig · glTF with embedded animations and morph targets