CryptoKitties Breeding Season
CryptoKitties hands-on: Three weeks in. Nine cats.
- Simpatico - Grey with pink stripes and Dalí's mustache. Rare dominant genes.
- Mongo - Orange-soda-colored calico, named after our Mongo and the database.
- Footer - Grey with swamp-green legs. Named after our Footer.
- Aristocat - Cloud-white with royal-purple accents and a beard.
- Cat Stevens - Obvious pun. Believes the world is flat.
- Mulberry - Mauve colored munchkin. Gen 6, fastest cooldown in my collection.
- Gravy - Chocolate-colored Himalayan.
- Dozer - Mongo and Simpatico's offspring. Crazy eyes.
- Sis - Last one born. A one-syllable name is easy for a cat to recognize.
See my family of kitties here, or in a standalone viewer.
The breeding mechanics are weirder than I expected. CryptoKitties don't have fixed genders. In each breeding, one cat plays the matron (mother - carries the kitten, goes on cooldown) and one plays the sire (father - breeds immediately, no cooldown). The matron's owner gets the offspring, after winning the bid for a Siring auction.
Any cat can play either role.
Simpatico (Ξ0.0498) has done both, and passed rare genes, cattributes, to the kids. She was matron for Footer and Sis. But when I bred Simpatico with Mongo (Ξ0.0622), he was the sire - Dozer came from Mongo.
Footer and Aristocat also swapped roles. Footer was matron for Cat Stevens. Aristocat was matron for Gravy. Same parents, different roles, different kittens.
I first thought that Cat Stevens got a mewtation: his tongue came from Footer. But the limegreen eyes? Neither parent has limegreen eyes visually displayed - Footer has topaz, Aristocat has mintgreen. This means Cat Stevens expressed limegreen from hidden/recessive genes in the ancestry. The trait was already in the gene pool (first discovered by kitty #3010 very early), just not visibly expressed in the parents.
I wanted to try out the marketplace. After siring ("hatching") and selling Vitalik to a user named meowcool01, and as painful as it was, I sold Mongo (at a loss... Ξ0.0179).
It's all on the blockchain. You can verify every breeding, every transaction, every lineage on Etherscan.
Hi nivs,
Good news! 58820 was just adopted. Congrats on a successful sale!
Wish your furry friend the best of luck on their new journey.
And hey, if you have a kitty-shaped hole in your heart, there are other CryptoKitties looking for a new home.
- CryptoKitties Team
Meanwhile, the news storm continues.
The first week was chaos. By December 6th, CNBC was calling it "the $100,000 digital beanie babies". SophiaTX delayed their token sale by 48 hours because we broke the network.
The birthing fee went from 0.001 to 0.002 to Ξ0.015 in two days. Fifteen times higher. CoinDesk ran a piece called "Cat Fight? Ethereum Users Clash Over CryptoKitties". 30,000 pending transactions. Reddit threads debating whether to raise the gas limit.
Two weeks ago, Founder Cat #18 sold for Ξ253. That's $110,000. For a cartoon cat.
December 10th was the peak - 52,000 sales in one day (launch day had 1,500).
150,000 users. 260,000 cats. More than $12 million traded. Digital beanie babies with transparent genetics.
Then it wound down. By December 11th, birthing fees dropped to Ξ0.008. The wave passed.
The hype will crash. The technology won't.