STRAYS

Ten thousand pixel-art shiba strays inscribed on Dogecoin. Some are given away by a shelter. Some are sold in a shop. This paper explains how the collection divides itself between the two without ever issuing the same dog twice.

The cap is 10,000, and it spans everything

STRAYS is capped at 10,000 pieces total. That number is not per channel and it is not a target — it is a ceiling on the whole collection. Every stray adopted from the shelter and every stray sold in the shop is drawn from the same ten thousand.

The cap is enforced by the id, not by a promise. Each stray carries a unique id from 1 to 10,000, and its artwork is derived deterministically from that id and a fixed seed. An id is the unit of scarcity: there is exactly one stray #4,182 possible, its appearance was decided before anyone asked for it, and no process can produce a second one.

Two channels, one pool

The collection exists to serve two purposes that pull in opposite directions. A shelter needs a supply of dogs to give away. A shop needs inventory to sell. Rather than run two collections, STRAYS runs one pool with two withdrawal paths.

The shelter channel

FDRE is an adoption shelter for unwanted Dogecoin inscriptions. People drop off pieces they no longer want and anyone can adopt one for the cost of moving it. The shelter's failure mode is an empty yard: a shelter with nothing in it has nothing to offer.

STRAYS is the shelter's own supply. When the yard falls below its floor, a release is triggered and new strays are minted into the shelter wallet, where they behave exactly like any other resident. They are not priced, not listed, and not inventory. A stray that reaches the shelter has left the sale pool permanently.

The shop channel

Sale stock is minted deliberately rather than on a trigger. Those strays are inscribed directly to a dedicated sale wallet, never the shelter's, and are listed on doginaldog.shop at a stated price.

A listing is a signed offer. The stray stays in its wallet until a buyer pays the asking price, at which point the offer completes and the piece moves in the same transaction that pays for it. Nothing is escrowed and nothing is held on a buyer's behalf.

Marks

Every other trait a stray carries is a quota: exactly one value per dog, dealt from a table that sums to the supply. Marks work the opposite way. There are ten of them and each is rolled independently, so a stray can carry none of them, all ten, or anything in between.

Muddy Paws Chewed Ear Burr Tail Scarred Nose Flea Bitten Torn Collar Street Smart Lucky Penny Storm Shy One Blue Eye

Each mark lands on about half the collection. Because the rolls are independent, the extremes are rare without being impossible: across all ten thousand, roughly ten strays carry no marks at all and roughly ten carry every one. Those counts are a consequence of the rule rather than a quota, so the collection publishes the rule and measures the result.

Marks are written into the inscription itself, alongside the artwork. A mark recorded only in a database would be a claim about a stray; written on chain it is a property of it.

Why nothing is pre-minted

Inscribing all ten thousand strays up front would cost thousands of DOGE and would commit every id before anyone wanted one. STRAYS mints on demand instead: the shelter mints what the yard needs, the shop mints what it intends to sell, and the rest of the collection remains unspent possibility.

This is also why the cap is credible. Unminted strays cost nothing to not issue, so there is no pressure to inflate the collection to recover an up-front spend.

Questions