Cryptokitties - guide to profitable play

CK can be a tricky place to start out or try to build your litter and raise ETH. This guide aims to explain the principles of profitable play (not spending more ETH while building out your litter and position in the game)

The article is written as a series of “levels” of play, gradually increasing in difficulty (required understanding of the game and available budget).

It is built on Pranked’s 2018 article (since there is no need to re-invent the wheel), but it aims to adds new aspects and additional detail.

#1 Entry level play (less than 0.1 ETH / 0 cats)

With a starting budget of 0.1 ETH or less and no cats, do not expect huge overnight gains. You need to prepare yourself for a patient struggle that requires discipline.

1) The first rule of a budget of this size, is you should almost NEVER breed cats if ever. The 0.008 breeding fee is a huge risk and the odds are stacked against you as other players have better cats and more tolerance for fails than you. Breeding is only one way of playing CK — there are many.

2) Prepare to invest a lot of time into researching cats and the market, with a budget of this size we really have to be ready to spot the bargains and arbitrage on the opportunity.

3) Gas prices are super important to us as we don’t have a lot of budget and need to make moves. So use Dapper!

4) Be sure to join the Cryptokitty discord and introduce yourself and make friends. Active community members often receive gifts from others, and you may even be able to strike a deal with a seasoned player to do kitty related work for them (such as minting WCK) in return for rewards/gains.

Strategies;

• Flipping: There are often opportunities in the marketplace for flipping at a small/stable profit. Find your niche and exploit it. When someone bigger is offloading cats, there is often profit to be made for the crafty. E.g. Gen:0 fast cats reached a floor of 0.1 recently as some people where selling out stock, now floor is back to 0.14. That’s a healthy 40% profit in just 1–2 weeks. Same can be true for Fancies that have just finished breeding (as breeders often sell out and then price stabilizes later at a slightly higher level). Gemmed cats can offer same flipping opportunities (don’t confuse real gems and family gems) and so can old cats (sub 100k IDs). The rule is find your niche, understand that particular market better than the average player and pounce when opportunity arises.
• WCK exchange: With the introduction of WCK, new revenue opportunities have opened up for players with very low entry levels. WCK is a token backed by an actual Cryptokitty. So if you hold a WCK token, you can trade it for any cat in the contract. That means we can use our own stray cats to get tokens and then try to go and find cats in the contract that could sell for more than the floor (pretty cats, low gen mewt cats etc). This can also help you build a better litter in terms of gen’s/traits for free.
• WCK arbitrage: At times there is a gap between the WCK price and the floor price of cats (historically as much as 20–30%) which creates an arbitrage option. Use tokens to take cats out, sell them on floor and buy more WCK. Or the other way around. Start small, grow bigger! This is one of the least risky ways of turning your play profitable, even if the gains are not glorious. Your goal is to accumulate both WCK and ETH.
• WCK trading: Trading WCK can be as profitable as trading any other coin. Historically prices have moved between 0.001 and 0.0022, so if you bought at 0.0011 and sold at 0.0022 you’d have doubled your ETH. Buy when the price hits your accumulation zone (for me that is less than 0.0013) and sell when it is over (say 0.0015 and above). As you grow bigger you can buy and sell larger portions, increasing overall profits!

#2 Intermediate play (0.1 ETH to 5 ETH)

You probably have some cats by now and you have hopefully got a sense of the market and the mechanics of the game. This can be a dangerous stage as it is tempting to get bold and go for an exciting breeding project or fancy chase. But understand you are still at a stage where all the good work can be quickly thrown overboard at a whim. Discipline, discipline, discipline!

Strategies;

• Supply a fancy chase: On occasion it may be viable to breed cats, especially during fancy chases. The term fancy mat relates to cats that have a high potential to make new or existing fancy cats (2/4 of the matching traits for that recipe). They are desired by all regular players in the early window of a new fancy. During live streams / community events a new fancy recipe is often teased at, if you are quick enough once traits are confirmed you have potential to make eth by buying mats before other players and flipping them for profit or breed more mats for selling which is slightly higher risk, but also potentially more reward. If you can gather two mats with a chance of hitting the fancy, you also give yourself a lottery ticket for every breed, even if that is not the main strategy/goal. I would not risk a spend of more than .1 on mats + breeding per fancy in the beginning, with the aim of returning 0.2–0.4 ETH if all goes well. Rinse and repeat two weeks later. Be mindful of the chase itself though. How is the excitement level, are there loads of well priced mats already with those traits? Bring your brain and A game to this activity!
• Flipping: Similar to the previous budget tier you have to invest a lot of time into researching cats and the market. Even with some more ETH to invest, research and ruthlessness is critical. But you can make slightly bolder moves now. Recently it has been possible to buy and sell e.g. Kitt-E cats with a profit (floor dropped to 0.18 and then went back up to 0.23–0.24). M4 cats at BIS gen can be another great re-sell strategy (if you don’t know what this means, this is not for you yet). Offers can be a great way of picking up awesome value cats for re-selling too.
• Breeding: Towards the later parts of this stage you can begin to think about select breeding pairs. If you can find two well priced BIS cats (say a Gen:3 Gemini and Gen:3 Dioscuri) you can join in on breeding specific rare M4 BIS cats (in this case gen:4 Kaleidoscope). This should be a profitable activity in time (mewtation sales + mat sales) but mind that the return period can be very long, so make sure you have enough liquidity to even out odds at scale. Needless to say you should do your research first, know your breeding %s and do your math before embarking on any purchases and breeding projects. I know a player that has just been breeding gen:2 cobalt for months and months and made 0.4 or so in total including the investment for the original cats — especially when we hit a fancy that required Cobalt and she had 4–5 ready to sell.

#2 Advanced play (5 ETH to 100+ ETH)

You’ve made it. You are a litter baron. But what now? How to take your game to the next level?

• Breeding: You can now expand your breeding. Use gains and liquidity to pick up new good BIS or Gen:0 pairs and continue to establish yourself while maintaining cash flow tightly. You can also try to identify specific areas that may be profitable in the long run(e.g. I bred out a bunch of low generation all black cats with onyx, alien, finalfrontier, egyptiankohl, shale a while ago etc. as I figured they were awesome looking and had good sales/siring potential).
• Siring: Once you have built up a better litter and done some breeding projects, chances are you are left with cats that have siring value. This is again a slow but no-downside way of profiting from your litter. I currently have about 300 cats out for continuous siring and make 0.15–0.3 ETH monthly from it.
• Liquidity provider: Uniswap allows you to stake both ETH and WCK for a share of the 0.3% trading fee. This is a slow but almost risk free way of making gains. I am targeting 8–10% gains a year this way. You also help the community trade better, which is awesome!
• Bigger bets = bigger opportunities: You can now afford to take bigger chances on flipping and you will probably feel more comfortable with it too. A few weeks ago I bought 10 gen:0s in one morning and had sold them all again 48 hours later for a total of 0.3 in profit. The more rare and expensive the cat, the higher the arbitrage potential (but there is also usually a corresponding lower liquidity, so you have to be happy to hold for a period and be okay with the risks involved). Knowledge/skills = gains and your CK network is also key here. Know what different players are looking for/value so you can pick up cats in demand and know where to go to sell them on. Gilded/diamond cats, old gen:0s, low cap fancies is your name of the game now to rise to the top ranks of CK! You can also use this to buy into some cats, trade them to other cats and then flip those at profit. I also recently bought a whole account to split it up and profit over time.
• Fancy chases: Fancy chases are the highest-risk, highest-reward activity in the game. A new #1 fancy can sell for 5 ETH+ and top 10–50 all trade at higher prices too. Only enter into a fancy chase if you have ETH to see it all the way through though (very important as the alternative is catastrophic), and be sure to sell and sire mats/fancies early to try to get back to break even, while retaining fancies for profit taking later. Check who else is breeding the fancy and what the likely cap is going to be. Evaluate your own odds honestly and cynically. If you don’t get good mats early, don’t do it (and switch to selling, quickly). Achieving high % chances during the race is crucial for profit (the first Poison Orchids we bred had less than 1% chance of hitting, the later stages had +30% pairs going. Also accept that a chase may end with you being down in ETH, but having accumulated fancies for your collection. You’ll need to be okay with that and be comfortable with a longer time line for returning your ETH. Study Kittypad, Scottland, Winchester, Derek etc. and other experts to see what they do during early stages of a chase before dipping your own toes.
• FOMO/FUD cycles are real and they matter! Just like BTC went from 20k to 3k back to 13k in the span of 12 months, so does also the CK market move in cycles of FOMO and FUD. The clever player will use periods of FUD to pick up quality in the market for cheap and use periods of FOMO to accumulate ETH for the next market cycle. Cycles are not hours or days, they are months and maybe even years (who knows). Always consider where in the cycle you think we are. I paid many ETH for cats 6 months ago that I could get for 50% cheaper now if I had conserved my ETH. Not getting carried away in FOMO and not feeling insecure in FUD periods are is the hardest lesson of all I think. All the blood of first time BTC investors at 20k is a testament to this. Buying at 3200 around Christmas and you are laughing now. In short, cycles matter — a lot!

Oh… and last but not least… always be selling!

Who am I to say anything? My CK username is Pookies/MadMaister. I have played CK since the early days in December 2017. For the first 6 months I only added 1 ETH, but have later added to my investment (during the ETH crash to 80 USD) once I was comfortable with my decision. My history in CK trading has allowed me to amass the game’s best full gem set, a full fancy set, exclusives, +1000 fancies and about 15,000 kitties in total. Play is self-sustaining now (I don’t buy/add new ETH and haven’t done for a number of months) and in the last 6 months I have even been able to take about 10 ETH in profit while accumulating more cats and fancies.

My game plan now is to continue to improve my litter/collection, have money to invest in chases and plans while overall being cash neutral and accumulate more WCK (I am long term bullish). Needless to say discipline is crucial still.

I also still need a founder!