The problem Onchained Tattoo Convention (WIP Title) solves

Tattoos never had a strong e-commerce model.
Despite all the comfort and benefits of online shopping, they are still being sold offline.

BirthMark Tattoo unlocks e-commerce for the tattoo industry, eliminates time and location constraints of an industry that can't satisfy its growing demand.

There is a lot of friction associated with buying tattoos online: Communication, money transfers, fair valuation, provenance, lack of secondary markets/royalties... We have experimented with a similar platform on Web2 for 7 years, we learned two things:

1. There is demand! With a good site SEO only, we made business through organic Google searches.

2. Every communication/transaction tend to happen on a different channel preferred by customers: Sometimes payments are made in cash, through bank transfers or checks... Sometimes communication happens through email, Whatsapp, site form or something else. It's impossible to keep a reliable record of every action that's necessary to purchase a tattoo.

• We built a platform where each action relating to a tattoo is recorded in its history on the blockchain.
• When clients purchase a tattoo on BirthMark, they are buying both its design + irl inking session.
• All transactions happen on chain, splitting the design and inking portions of the sale price, and handling them separately, while providing both parties fairness and flexibility.
• BirthMark is a core product that aims to be the one-stop-shop for everything relating to tattoo art. We have many undisclosed modules in pre-production that are potential game-changer features for the trade.

ONCHAINED TATTOO FESTIVAL

BirthMark was launched on BASE mainnet in May 2024.
A global tattoo competition with a juicy prize pool from our team and our sponsors/partners will attract many great artists around the globe.
By letting them register for free, compete from the comfort of their own studio and with the help of new CB smart wallets, we aim to onboard 100 new creators and 1000 mints.

Challenges I ran into

We are proposing a shift in consumer behaviour: Buy tattoos online, buy ready, original designs from artists, combine your vacations and your inking sessions if you have the means. Also, see tattoo artists as fine artists, not craftsmen. Take them out of the parlor and put them in the gallery. They are master painters, working on the most unforgiving canvas. And they have much more creativity in them than inking the 5th Spiderman of that week...

Changing consumer behaviour and explaining this thesis is the hardest part. Funny enough, it's harder to explain to crypto-natives than it is to non-crypto-native tattoo artists. Artists and suppliers can see the potential, because they know the bottleneck they are in. Crypto-native community leaned more towards ponzis since 2022, so it's much harder for them to grasp the value of bringing an already functioning industry (which doesn't care if we are in a bear or bull market) to blockchain.

To introcude the tattoo meta to Web3 and raise a modest amount for our bootstapped platform, we have worked our socials for 2 years and launched 3 collections: 1 on Ethereum and 2 on Bitcoin Ordinals. 2/3 of these collections were free mints to grow our community. We minted the first tattoo collection on Bitcoin, with the first customizable recursive minting UI that we built ourselves. Against all our efforts, our fund raising and overall efforts ended up with loss of money, work and time.

Now, we are back to our fundamentals:

• We tried to fund-raise from Web3 space by pushing the tattoo meta
• We're back to utilizing blockchain for the tattoo industry and elevate the art form instead

To solve all these problems I explained, we have shipped our platform first, and now turned our faces to our target audience. We rented space at TAF Tattoo Fest in May and met artists, studios, suppliers, publishers. Tattoo world is very excited with this idea. We want to onboard them fast and seamlessly with this online festival we are organizing.