CryptoKitties
Digital Cats on the Blockchain.
We were paying customers at Tracx. Pretty rare for a startup to pay for an open-source database. We decided to pay after a catastrophic power outage took down our cluster. MongoDB gave us amazing and around-the-clock support for free that one time. Next time, we were on our own. Unless we paid.
We paid.
Footer has been with us longer. He definitely has 9 lives, gravity proved it.
Now I have digital versions of both.
CryptoKitties launched a week ago. Already clogging the Ethereum network so badly it accounts for 11% of all transactions, up from 4% two days ago.
The premise: buy cats, breed them, trade them. Each one lives on the blockchain as a unique token. Each one has a 256-bit genome - 48 genes across 12 traits. The breeding logic runs entirely on-chain. No central server decides what your kitten looks like. The smart contract does.
Axiom Zen built it. Vancouver company. They unveiled it at ETH Waterloo in October.
Three days ago, someone paid $113,000 for the Genesis cat. 246 ETH. For a cartoon cat. The top five sales, rare traits, are all five figures now. More than $1M has been transacted so far.
The network is struggling. Transactions are backing up. Axiom Zen doubled the birthing fee to push transactions through faster ("ensure your kittens are born on time!").
Even Vitalik weighed in: "I actually like the digital cat games. They illustrate very well that the value of a blockchain extends far beyond applications that would literally get shut down by banks or governments if they did not use one."
I paid more in transaction fees than the cat itself cost. But I wanted to understand what this is.
The only way I understand technology is by using it. I bought Bitcoin to buy drinks at a club. I bought Ethereum to buy cartoon cats. The pattern holds.
What interests me isn't the cats. It's the mechanism. Provable ownership without a central authority. Programmable scarcity. The ownership record lives on the blockchain. The cat's genome is immutable once it's born. What happens to the game around it - that's up to Axiom Zen.
This is the first consumer application I've seen that makes smart contracts understandable to people. "I own this cat" is easier to explain than "I own this fungible token representing a fraction of a liquidity pool". Makes it so much easier to dismiss as a dumb idea.
Most of these cats will be worthless. The network will hopefully scale (or it won't, here's to stress testing!). But the underlying idea - that's worth paying attention to.
