About Waajji
Waajji is a studio of social behaviorists, economists, game designers, and philosophers. We build playful things that test social science — because people are most honest when they are playing, and a finding is most useful when it is playable.
The studio
Waajji began in 2025 with four chairs and one argument. A sociologist said people could be understood. An economist said they could be priced. A game designer said they could be designed for. A philosopher asked what any of it meant. The argument never ended — it just moved into a workshop, and the workshop started making things.
That is the studio's method: take a question about people and operationalize it — turn a theory that cannot be asked into a situation that can be played. A synthesizer built from a thousand-year-old diagram asks how structure becomes feeling. A card game that trades like a stock exchange asks how greed forms among strangers. A duck race whose odds lie asks how crowds read a rigged market. Each product is a small field experiment, and everyone who plays it is a collaborator — because in the social sciences, the observer is always part of the observation.
The work runs on two lines. Unfiltered, with Team Tartulus, keeps the studio's hand in the physical world — sound, objects, and on-chain artifacts, kept imperfect on purpose. Team Wik20 works in rules: learning tools and games that circulate ideas online. One studio, two lines, and the same suspicion underneath both: that the best way to understand people is to hand them something strange and watch.
The name
“Waajji takes its name from the founders, wai ip and jj — but names outlive their owners, and this one wandered off and became something else. Say it aloud and you can hear it: the small sound an observer makes at the edge of a page when a crowd does something the books didn't predict. Waajji. The sound of an experiment working.”
The habit lives in the name: watch first, record what actually happened, and let the surprise stand.
Products as social instruments
We design objects, brands, and network tools that make people behave like themselves — curious, tangible, and a little strange on purpose.
A hypothesis you can wear, hear, trade, and play is a hypothesis that can fail in public — and that is the only kind worth keeping. We turn questions into products, and products into evidence.
A familiar shape with a strange rule — a card game that is an exchange, a duck race that is a market — is the fastest way to make people behave like themselves. Familiarity lowers their guard; strangeness raises the stakes.
Imperfection is not a flaw; it is a condition. The noise, the error, the crooked seam — that is where the interesting behavior lives, so we keep it.
An experiment that only serves the experimenter is a hobby. We make things people actually want: money taught through practice, instruments you can play, games you can win.
Two lines, one studio
Offline / physical — with Team Tartulus
The studio's hand in the physical world: SC synthesizers, seasonal clothing, lifestyle goods, music releases, and Tezos-native works. Nothing polished on purpose — the seam sits crooked, the synth hisses, and that is the point.
Online / network
Waajji's network projects: Investment Lesson (money taught through practice), DeckX (an exchange disguised as a card game), and Duck Derby (a duck-racing arena built on bluff). Each one is a live experiment in how ideas move online.
The theory shelf
The ideas behind the products — and where to read them yourself. Every Waajji project is a theory you can play; these are the books behind the play.
DeckX
George Soros — The Alchemy of Finance (1987)
Participants' views shape events, and events shape views — continuously, circularly. DeckX builds the loop into its rules and lets strangers trade inside it.
Soros' central claim is that market participants do not observe reality from outside — their thinking changes the situation, and the changed situation changes their thinking, in a loop with no fixed point. The orthodox assumption is that prices reflect reality; reflexivity says prices help make reality. In DeckX the loop is literal: a card's value is whatever the table's belief says it is, and the belief moves the next auction. Watch the price of an extraction target after its suit is revealed — the loop, in miniature, trading at 15-second intervals.
DeckX
Georg Simmel — The Philosophy of Money (1900)
The stranger is near enough to trade with and far enough to distrust. An anonymous market asks what trade looks like when no one owes anyone anything.
Simmel's stranger is a member of the group who has not belonged to it from the beginning: present enough to transact, detached enough to owe nothing. Trade between strangers, Simmel argued, is the purest form of economic exchange because it is stripped of obligation. DeckX pushes this to the limit — seller identities hidden, blind trades sight unseen, fraud legal. What remains is not trust but information: reading the table replaces knowing the person.
Duck Derby
George Akerlof — The Market for Lemons (1970)
When buyers can only judge by statistics, the market fills with lemons. Duck Derby constructs the asymmetry and prices it instead of resolving it.
Akerlof's paper asks what happens when quality is hidden: the buyer can only judge by a market statistic, so the seller of a good product cannot prove it, and the market prices everything as average — which drives the good out and leaves the lemons. Duck Derby is a lemon market that refuses to collapse: the statistic (breed, level, record) is visible, the truth (attributes, personality, running style) is not, and the odds system prices the gap. Every bet is a guess about hidden quality, which is exactly the problem Akerlof described — made playable instead of pathological.
Duck Derby
Émile Durkheim — The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)
The charge a crowd generates when it gathers around one focus. The monthly Duck King Derby is that charge, scheduled in advance.
Durkheim studied how societies hold themselves together and found the mechanism in ritual: when a group gathers around a single focus, the crowd generates a surplus of collective energy — effervescence — that binds its members and recharges their shared identity. The Duck King Derby is this mechanism on a schedule: five races, one harbor, everyone betting and shouting at the same five minutes of the month. The winner gets a crown; the crowd gets the effervescence.
Unfiltered
Erving Goffman — The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959)
Social life is a performance with a front stage and a back stage. Unfiltered abolishes the back stage and shows the seams.
Goffman read everyday interaction as theatre: we manage a front stage — the polished self we perform — and guard a back stage where the preparation, mistakes, and mess live. Brands are expert front-stage performers; they hire whole teams to keep the back stage invisible. Unfiltered reverses the direction: the crooked seam, the hissing synth, the unretouched recording are the back stage, exhibited on purpose. If identity is a dramatic effect of what is shown, then showing everything is a statement about what identity is for.
Investment Lesson
Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky — Prospect Theory (1979); Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)
Losses loom larger than gains. Money is decided by mathematics and by the mind that misuses it — the course teaches both.
Prospect theory's founding observation is that losses loom larger than gains: the pain of losing ¥100 outweighs the pleasure of winning it by roughly two to one, and people feel this asymmetry before they can reason about it. That single bias explains panic selling, holding losers too long, and chasing rallies — the behaviors that cost more than any interest rate. Investment Lesson teaches the formulas and then the failure modes of the mind that uses them, because a calculator is only as rational as the person pressing the buttons.
Waajji
The methodological tradition — Sociology's core practice
A theory that cannot be tested is a rumor. We turn theories into playable situations — the field experiment is the product.
Operationalization is the step that turned sociology into a science: take an abstract concept — trust, greed, status, risk — and define it as a procedure that can be observed and measured. The concept becomes what the procedure measures. Waajji's version of the procedure is play: a card game that operationalizes reflexivity, a duck race that operationalizes asymmetric information, a synthesizer that operationalizes structure-becoming-feeling. The field experiment is the product; the players are the instruments.
A short history
2025
Four disciplines, one argument, and a workshop that started making things. The two lines take shape: Unfiltered for the physical, Wik20 for the network.
2025
The first Wik20 project goes live: a public money-education course that teaches finance and mathematics together — free at its core, with AI learning reviews and browser-run experiments.
2025
The brand manual is written: a platform for sound, objects, and on-chain artifacts across Macau, Tokyo, Taipei, and Brisbane. The SC synthesizer series, seasonal clothing, and the first on-chain works follow.
2026
DeckX and Duck Derby enter development — the exchange-card game and the strategy duck-racing arena — while Mindseeker's Shokunin's Training ships as a public demo on itch.io.
Collaborations, press, and curious inquiries. If you read the field notes and want to be part of the next experiment, write to us.
ContactQuestions, answered plainly
Physical brands and network projects. Unfiltered builds sound, objects, and on-chain artifacts — synthesizers, clothing, lifestyle goods, music releases. Team Wik20 builds learning tools and games — Investment Lesson, DeckX, and Duck Derby. Everything is designed as a small social experiment you can use.
Products designed to test how people behave — how they gather, trade, play, bluff, and make meaning. We believe a good hypothesis about people should be something you can wear, hear, or play. The product is the experiment; the users are the data; the fun is the point.
A team of social behaviorists, economists, game developers, and philosophers, founded in 2025. The studio runs two lines: Unfiltered (with Team Tartulus) for the physical side, and Team Wik20 for the network side.
A registered company — 哇嘰網路科技有限公司 — that works like a studio. We use the name Waajji everywhere publicly.
The ones that are live are open: Investment Lesson's core stages are free. Unfiltered products are physical goods with real prices. DeckX and Duck Derby are in development and will announce their own models when they launch.
Write to hello@waajji.com. For Unfiltered specifically, find @UFLT_ASIA on X or unfiltered_asia on SoundCloud. Collaborations, press, and curious inquiries are all welcome.
