A new, decentralised, autonomous organisation that was launched last month seeks to essentially merge living creatures with cryptocurrency, Vice Motherboard reports.
Presenting themselves as a collective of artists, the group, BitMouseDAO, told the media outlet that they "prefer to be like pack with no country, no gender, no member" at this stage.
"BitMouseDAO is an art project that connects the crypto world with the art world as well as the biological realm through the bold idea of putting bitcoins in mice," they said. "We explore consensus on the value of crypto and our vision for the future of technology. We aren't making a biochemical monster."
BitMouseDAO's plan involves using a cold wallet, where purchased bitcoins are going to be pumped into, to generate a private key offline.
That private key then would be encoded into mouse DNA via genetic engineering, with BitMouseDAO expressing hope that the mouse's offspring will inherit the key as well.
"Ideally the offspring of the BitMouse would also carry the private key," they explained. "We would make specimens of them to sell at auction after they die of natural causes. At that point, a single Bitcoin would split into multiple specimens, but as soon as someone breaks the specimen to extract the genetic information and thus remove the BitMouse, the other specimens would lose their value. On the flip side, breaking the specimen and destroying the artwork may not even happen when bitcoins are worthless."
BitMouseDAO also promised not to harm the mice involved in the scheme, as the code would be introduced into the creatures' DNA either via a harmless virus or through gene editing techniques that won't target any useful proteins.
By 31 January, however, the group had "almost no money" as the only two investors it managed to attract contributed .01 ETH each.