CryptoKitties 101: Everything You Need to Know

What happens when you mix blockchain, one of the most disruptive technologies of the modern world, with the internet’s love for cute cats? Welcome to the incredible world of CryptoKitties. An online game by Vancouver-based Axiom Zen that allows users to purchase, trade, and breed digital kittens, CryptoKitties has taken the cryptocurrency world by storm since its public release on November 28. The volume of traffic on the platform in its first week itself has been enough to put a serious strain on the Ethereum cryptocurrency ecosystem on which it is built.

CryptoKitties is an ethereum game that puts cartoon cats on the ...

And anyone can sell their kittens via an auction, where they pick a starting price and an ending price and the price declines over time until someone buys it. So for example I could put a kitten up for sale for a one day auction for 1 ETH starting price and 0 ETH ending price, and if someone buys it 12 hours after the auctions starts they’d be paying me .5 ETH.

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But the game gets interesting once you start figuring out which traits are rare, and how to get them. For example, there are thousands of kitties in the game, but according to kitty-tracking site CryptoKittydex, there are only 81 "mainecoon" kitties, and only 156 "jaguar" kitties.

Each time a cat breeds the generation increases one. So the offspring of a Gen 0 kitten would be a Gen 1, and so on. Earlier generation kittens seem to be selling for more money, both for the intangible rareness factor and the tangible fact that earlier generation kittens usually have shorter cool down times.

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It's important to know what you're doing, though. CryptoKittydex keeps track of traits and how common they are. So even if someone puts up their kitty for sale and calls it "ULTRA RARE," you can look at this table and see whether its traits are actually rare.

While it may be tempting to call CryptoKitties it’s very own cryptocurrency, the creators of the game insist that it’s not. Rather, it’s a product that can simply only be purchased using ether.

The cats are also breedable, meaning you can combine two kitties to create an offspring. Some 24,048 unique kittens had been sold as of this writing, for an average price of $115.61 per feline.

CryptoKitties runs as a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, where each kitten represents a “token” in the blockchain, just like the cryptocurrency Ether. Every fifteen minutes a new “Generation 0” cat is born, offered for 1.5 times the average price of the last five cats (currently at about 10 ETH or $4500 per G0 cat). The price will fall indefinitely within the next 24 hours until the cat finds a new owner. According to the same principle (aka reverse auction), users can also offer their cats for sale, effectively creating an exchange for these crypto-collectibles. The transactions in the game work exclusively with the cryptocurrency Ether.

Trying to explain Ethereum to someone who is unfamiliar with the topic is a bit like administering anesthesia. You start by explaining a blockchain and their eyes slowly glaze over. By the time you've gotten to smart contracts and ICOs, they're slack jawed and drooling all over the place. When you're finished and they regain consciousness, they won't remember a thing.

I reached out to the author of a Telegram bot that alerts users when a desirable cat appears on the Ethereum blockchain so they can snap it up. They told me they don’t believe their program breaks the CryptoKitty game, but that others might. Even so, “If they bothered to take the time and effort to utilize their skills to do it, then I don't see anything wrong with it,” they wrote me.

All kittens on CryptoKitties possess certain traits. Across the platform, certain traits are a lot rarer, and therefore more valuable, than others. Hence, if you possess a kitten with rare traits, you could potentially trade it to another willing player for a lot of Ether. This creates a thriving market where people conduct higher trade volumes and spend more in search of kittens with those rare traits.

Other projects in the blockchain space are exploring the use of provably rare assets in games, such as the digital trading card game Spells of Genesis. Another is the RarePepe meme market, in which people can create and trade unique cards based on the Pepe the Frog meme.

The app was conceived as a way to make blockchain-driven systems entertaining and possibly informative for those unfamiliar with making and receiving payments. It certainly makes light of the ICO-driven scene on the Ethereum blockchain, which has been causing a serious stir in the tech startup world, especially in regard to the vast sums of money being poured into them.

After the smart contract was registered on the Rinkeby blockchain, Mother's status on the CryptoKitties site was changed to pregnant. If I wanted her to give birth to a new kitten, I would have to generate another smart contract like the one above. If this was real money, birthing this new kitten would cost me about $1.50. Once the birth smart contract was executed on the Rinkeby network, a new kitten appeared on my profile. I've named it Motherboard:

Before I could begin breeding cats, I had to download Metamask, a plugin for the Chrome Browser that enables users to interact with apps on the Ethereum blockchain. After generating a wallet and filling it with some free Ether from the Rinkeby faucet, I was ready to breed. Unfortunately, all the cats generated for the hacking competition had already been given away so I had to ask some people in the CryptoKitties chatroom to send two of their own cats to my Ethereum wallet.

CryptoKitties is a pretty unique application on the Ethereum network, but the question is whether anyone will actually use it. Although the game is super accessible to those unfamiliar with blockchain tech, few have adopted it--but I'm paws-up for what's to come.