Technology connected us to everyone — and somehow, we got lonelier. PIF12 is my experiment in using onchain blessings to bring the people I admire into one circle — a constellation that keeps growing as we light each other up, across twelve years.
See What I'm Building | 佩福12年What is Omamori?
PIF12 (short for Pay it Forward 12) is a twelve-year community experiment by Jason Lai — a new Soulbound Token (SBT) design minted on Ethereum each year, given to people I admire and friends willing to walk together across a full zodiac cycle.
I've kept an annual ritual for years: around Thanksgiving and Lunar New Year, I send blessings to the people around me. PIF12 brings it onchain — Thanksgiving's gratitude, the omamori's blessing (御守, a small shrine charm), and the twelve zodiac years as its clock. One omamori token a year, for those willing to walk part or all twelve with me. Can't be bought. Can't be transferred. Its only value: we actually came — and I'll always be here.
The Horse year opens the constellation — with no cap on its first stars. From Year Two, Lightkeepers will carry the spirit forward, each lighting up new Stars of their own, and the constellation keeps growing.
Why 12 Years?
Horse to Snake. Twelve years completes one cycle in East Asian cosmology — a closing, and a return.
Research suggests deep trust takes 7–10 years of shared experience. Twelve years gives strangers enough time to become a community.
Has technology made us lonelier? If we use the same technology to build real connection — what happens after twelve years? This is the question I want to answer.
About the Founder
Just a homo sapiens who likes projects that pull double duty.
PIF12 is the first thing I've fully committed to building.
Also known as 佩福12年 in Chinese — a 12-year commitment of my blessings, onchain, for people I admire.
What stays, when people leave?
Their blessings — kept onchain.
What can one homo sapiens build, with AI and no funding?
That's the experiment.
What is blockchain for, if not just institutions?
A playground. Ours.
Build the playground — and all three answers arrive at once.
The algorithms aren't going anywhere. I'm turning their magic against the loneliness they brought — and inviting you in.
How It Works
A new Omamori design mints on Ethereum each year — no cap on how many can be claimed. Year One: Horse.
Thanks to Privy, no seed phrase needed. No gas fees, for now. Sign in with email, claim with one click.
At least one in-person gathering each year. Different city each time. Real faces, real trust.
I'm hoping you're the kind of "weird" that actually likes helping — where help means what they need, not what you want to give.
Every act of kindness is a star,
Together, we are drawing a constellation that will light up the dark.
Get Involved
Tell me about a time you helped someone, or a time someone helped you. That's the whole ask — then I'll send you a personal link to claim your Horse-year omamori. Live on Ethereum now — no wallet, no gas.
Architecture, governance, and the twelve-year vision — direction over heat, all open source. Soulbound by design: nothing to buy, only proof we showed up.
Curious but not ready to reach out yet? Ask Lia, my AI companion, anything — about this project, and about me. A gentle first step toward saying hello, under the same North Star.
FAQ
PIF12 (Pay it Forward 12) is a twelve-year community experiment by Jason Lai. Each year, a new Soulbound Token (SBT) design is minted on Ethereum and given to the people Jason admires or shares values with. The tokens cannot be bought, sold, or transferred — their only value is that we actually showed up.
The concept of Soulbound Tokens (SBT) originates from Vitalik Buterin's paper. PIF12 currently uses the ERC-1155 format, with a smart-contract non-transferability constraint binding tokens to wallet addresses chosen by the holder. The reason for the non-transferable design: having watched several crypto bull-bear cycles and NFT hype-pump-dump rounds, I want PIF12's SBTs to stay community-oriented — keeping room for game-like interactions, proposal mechanisms, and whatever future shape this community wants to grow into.
By default, Jason serves as admin: after verifying your identity, he can help recover a lost or compromised SBT. We're not pursuing absolute decentralization at this experimental stage — it's neither realistic nor practical right now; that may evolve later. If you prefer a different setup, two alternatives are available: (1) Lone-wolf mode — remove Jason's admin permissions entirely and self-custody your SBT, full risk on you, fully aligned with web3 principles; (2) Social-recovery mode — designate two guardian angels who can help recover your SBT if your wallet is hacked or your private key is lost. All three modes are built into the contract and live from the 6/21 mainnet launch — the default applies automatically, with zero setup. The self-serve interface for switching modes ships later; until then, just ask Jason and he'll help you switch.
PIF12 SBTs cannot be purchased or traded. Recipients are people Jason admires — those who think across disciplines and like to build through hands-on experimentation, typically friends both old and new who embrace both technology and humanities, alongside companions who genuinely help others. The intent is to weave an organic community that resists tech-driven loneliness.
PIF12 is Jason's reaction to the AI era. As AI makes it easier to operate without human cooperation, PIF12 is a deliberate experiment in the opposite direction — using blockchain to build a slow, durable, human-centered circle of trust across twelve years.
It's hard to predict twelve years out — twelve years ago (2014), Ethereum hadn't even launched yet. That uncertainty is part of what makes this experiment interesting and beautiful. Technically, the most certain thing is: as long as nothing happens to me, the SBTs will live onchain for the full twelve years and beyond — though forks or chain migrations remain possible.
By then, crypto adoption should be much wider — comparable to how 2007–2019 took us from the Nokia 3310 to a smartphone in every pocket. Blockchain's affordances should be everywhere yet invisible in daily use. After PIF12 completes, the hope is to evolve into Republic Labs — Republic from res publica (the public's matter), a self-sustaining community holding the public space and giving members a sense of belonging; Labs encourages experimentation, where members can launch their own small experiments. Maybe by then countless new PIF12s will appear — a constellation of small experiments lighting up.
Honestly? Because PIF12 is a twelve-year promise, and the chain it lives on is one of the very few choices that's almost impossible to undo. A cheaper Layer-2 like Base would save on gas — but each L2 is still a young system carrying its own sequencer, treasury, and governance risk across a twelve-year horizon, and the chain that's hottest this year can be cold in three. So PIF12 optimizes for survival, not hype: Ethereum L1 is the most permanent ground available — the best bet that these blessings are still here in 2037. The gas cost of a low-frequency project like this — a handful of onchain actions per member per year — is modest. For Year One and Year Two I cover it for you — through the relay, plus a Paymaster from Year Two — so you pay nothing for now. I'm not promising twelve years of free, though: whether I can keep covering it beyond that depends on Ethereum's gas fees and my own finances. It's the North Star applied to infrastructure: choose direction over heat.
An experiment deserves some experimental spirit.
Hypothesis: technology is neutral — the same force behind our loneliness can also be the tool that reconnects us. The problem was never the tool; it's how we use it.
The control group needs no recruiting — it's everyday life: tech loneliness is this era's default setting. We'd rather chat with an AI all night than take a ten-minute call from a human.
The treatment group is here: a charm you can't buy or transfer, one ritual a year, and a circle of people deliberately connected — curious, generous, and unwilling to throw the baby of technology out with the bathwater. Setting out in the Year of the Horse, arriving in the Year of the Snake.
Observed over twelve years: who's still here, who helped whom, who brought new stars.
Success is defined as: by the Snake year of 2037, this constellation no longer needs me — it hatches into Republic Labs — curiosity as the warp, practice as the weft, woven into a tribe: a public space where members light each other up and launch experiments of their own. Come check the results then — or fork the experiment and run your own.