That's it. No farewell post. No goodbye email. Just a redirect.

Tracx has discontinued operations.

Talkwalker, the global leader in advanced listening & AI-powered social media analytics, is here to help with your social listening needs.

So long, Tracx.

Started in my garage in 2006. Officially launched in 2008.

The idea was simple: listening to what people say online is important and valuable. That hunch turned out to be right. We were just a little early, a little under-resourced, and made plenty of mistakes along the way.

Five co-founders. Went through four CEOs.

Three rebranding exercises.

Ten years ago today, Satoshi Nakamoto mined the genesis block, embedding a headline from The Times into Bitcoin's first transaction: "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks". Timestamp and thesis in one sentence.

In 2009, Chancellor Alistair Darling was considering a second £37 billion injection into British banks. Satoshi responded by launching a system that doesn't need bailing out.

Five years ago, I tried to get my hands on original copies of that edition. Three came from Historic Newspapers, ordered in December 2013. A fourth came from Bygone News in January 2014 - the last copy they had. The fifth came through Bitcointalk. A UK seller named jonny1000 had posted his copy on January 3rd, 2014, Bitcoin's fifth anniversary. He'd originally listed it at 0.1 BTC. By the time he'd finished calling the archive services to try to source more for buyers, the price had changed. He called three companies. All three told him January 3rd, 2009 had sold out in the last few days due to, as he put it, "something to do with Bitcoin and extremely high demand".

The scramble was widespread. GettingPersonal couldn't source copies after multiple follow-ups. Papers Past found two copies but they were the Scottish edition. I paid 0.589 BTC for jonny1000's copy on January 30th - roughly $470 at the time - with shipping to Tel Aviv included. He e-mailed me a photo of his driving license next to the newspaper with my name written on a note before I sent the transaction. It arrived via Royal Mail a week later.

Someone reverse-engineered the breeding algorithm.

The GeneScience contract was the only part Axiom Zen kept closed. Everything else was open-source: KittyCore, the auction house, the CEO controls. All on Etherscan.

But the breeding logic? Bytecode only. No source code, no comments. Just machine instructions.

The main contract even taunts you:

// Call the sooper-sekret gene mixing operation.
uint256 childGenes = geneScience.mixGenes(matron.genes, sire.genes, matron.cooldownEndBlock - 1);

Makes sense. If you know the breeding math, you can game the market.

Didn't last. The community cracked it in five days.

December 18, 2017. Kai Turner figured out the genome structure. Each kitty has a 256-bit integer. Break it into 5-bit chunks and you get 48 genes. Four genes per trait. Primary (visible) plus three hidden recessives.

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.

Update: I built a CryptoKitties graph visualizer.
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.

Digital Cats on the Blockchain.

Mongo is named after MongoDB.

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.

Fifteen years ago today, Moranne Amit was murdered.

I worked as a software engineer at Applicad from 1997 to 2000. Strange arrangement. Days belonged to the IDF. Nights to Applicad. Same job writing code, different desks. Sometimes I slept under one.

Moranne was the administrative assistant to the CEO. Brief conversations by the coffee machine. Quick mind. Sharp as hell.

One night, must have been '98, there was a critical bug blocking a release. Dror, Ilan, and me were the ones who had to fix it. Dror was a senior engineer, Ilan the VP R&D. They've since become like family. That night we were just three guys staring at screens, trying to make the impossible happen.

Moranne was the last person to leave the office besides us. It was already late.

About 30 minutes later, she walks back in. Doesn't say a word. Just puts down a bag of snacks and a couple packs of cigarettes on the desk. Turns around and leaves.

That's the kind of person she was. Small gestures. No fanfare.

A few years later, we had different kinds of conversations. Late nights, ICQ, just as friends, about love and relationships. Open, honest. She had this way of thinking about things. Sharp. Questioning. Never satisfied with simple answers.