Analytics of gaming smart contracts by examining the Cryptokitties Game. Part 2

10 min readJul 12, 2019

Continue study of Cryptokitties game. To read from the very beginning follow the link

What cats are marketed more often?

As we showed above, a separately taken attribute of a Normal cat does not statistically affect the price or the number of purchases of this cat. The difference over a large sample is obvious only between different types of kitty tokens. The histogramme of the dependence of the number of deals on the type of a kitty illustrates this:

As you can see, the majority of deals occur with fancy kitties and ones having wild traits. But, if to separate these parameters to total amount of kitties for each type, then it is noticeable that the most purchased and sold cryptopets are ones from Special Edition.

Thus, if player wants to make money off virtual pets, he should pay more attention to Special and Fancy items.

What days are the most productive for Kitty sales?

Widely recognizable chart illustrating the number of calls to KittyCore contract with the splash in the end of 2017 is almost identical to the stats of all deals, with the exception of New Year 2018.

If we take the stats by days of a week, then Wednesday is a bit ahead, though these data may be deceptive.

When we look at this option with a limited number of users that had only 10 Kitty turnover or less ( i. e. to remove the accounts of avid players, markets, shops, etc), then the 1st position goes to Monday and Tuesday:

Almost the same picture we get from Ether turnover for the SaleClockAuction contract. For all addresses who play Cryptokitties game:

For addresses whose turnover is less than 10 Cryptokitties:

In addition, to answer the question correctly we should remember about the difference in time zones. However, we will come back to days of week further on.

What Kitties have made the most
profit for their owners?

As we have already found out the rareness of a cat and its cattributes do not affect the price so much as some unique “off-game” characteristics (token ID, name, etc) do. To confirm this, let us look at Kitty tokens for which difference between purchase price and selling price exceeds the amount of 100 Eth (towards an increase).

As you can observe, the most profit-making Kitties’ IDs are under 100. These are the so- called “founders’ cats”, that firstly were bought for 9 Ether and then sold for 100+ Ether.

Let us have a look at a list with “younger” cryptopets ( ID > 100):

id 114684 ~ name FRAIDSYCAT

id 2238 ~ name 战斗猫

id 35068 ~ name Dracula | Earliest Gen Vampire

And the Kitty purchased for 600 Eth you are already familiar with!

What smart contracts Cryptokitties
players call the most?

Here are the most requested smart contracts by Cryptokitties users for the latest 3 months ( the titles for smart contracts were extracted from bloxy.info). Requests from user accounts to smart contracts:

Requests from smart contracts addresses to user accounts:

Recognizable addresses of exchanges (EtherDelta, IDEX) are diluted with some other interesting accounts. One may observe a nice scope of cryptogames: 0xUniverse, Axie Infinity, KryptoWar (ranked third, titleless), MLB Champions and a number of some other apps. Also the presence of casino smart contracts (Dice2Win, FckDice) and other addresses belonging to gambling services in the list is interesting . Also several auctions can be found. All these DApps should be cared in mind when to run advertising campaign or use any other means to attract the target audience (airdrop, for example). Auctionity is the first, but there is some surprise in these stats. More details are further on:)

How often do the users play Cryptokitties game?

The average interval between two calls from one and the same player is less than 2 minutes. Still, this parameter is interesting for short periods of time.

Let us take the Retention parameter for first months after Cryptokitties were launched and compare it to the number of calls for that period:

23 November, 2017–1 May, 2018

23 November, 2017–1 December, 2017 (before the upsurge)

December, 2017 (upsurge)

January, 2018

February, 2018

March, 2018

You see during the most active periods the chart is shifted to the right. This may indicate that since the users have made several transactions within a couple of minutes, they do not leave the application, but remain in the game for a longer period: 2–3 hours or more.

Thus, by using this metric, it is possible to track the interest to a new introduced game event or advertising campaign. First, we focus on the number of transactions and the influx of unique addresses — this is the first step of analysis. Then we can assess the quality of the audience that came: whether they only started the DApp,made some test transactions and quitted or joined the existing players of a game.

Still, it should be noted that the explanation provided above does not cover all the cases. If for Cryptokitties we have a dragging out when activity is high, therefore the understanding of crypto casinos logic should be quite different.

Have a look at the chart describing the user retention of Dice2Win (0xD1CEeeeee83F8bCF3BEDad437202b6154E9F5405) casino for the latest 3 months:

Another example of a Cryptokitties-like game is Dragonereum:

November,2018 — December, 2018 (the upsurge in activity when
everyone bought and unpacked the eggs):

December, 2018 — January, 2019 (after the peak, when battles and trading began):

What days of week the increase in unique users does occur the most?

If take the general stats, then most of the users seem to come on Monday. However, considering time zones and if to request the data for separate months, then the most active days of a week are Saturday and Sunday, followed by Friday and Monday. Conversely, the most passive days are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

These days are good to initiate certain gaming activities or start advertising campaigns.

What other smart contract and DApps do request to Cryptokitties and what for?

Here are the list of smart contracts ( total number is 225) that interacted with KittyCore Contract. The descriptions are taken from bloxy.info.

Apart from 7 dozen autowallets the full list contains several quite interesting smart-contracts that attempted to create autonomous contracts over the Kittycore contract. For example, the battles between cats :) Unfortunately, none of them took off. EtherDelta is just a throw off (two transactions over a year old)

What are the top reasons of fail requests?

The majority of fail transactions happened when a player wanted to call a certain method when he had no permission to do this. For example, to sell someone else’s kitty. If we look at chart of fail transactions, we will see that most of them are concentrated in December, 2017, when the project was just launched. It can be assumed that at the first stage there were some bugs when forming a transaction on the UI, that were later fixed.

On 25 March, 2018 the address 0x68B42E44079D1D0A4A037E8C6ECD62C48967E69F made 3330 failed transactions trying to call the breedWithAuto method.

Here is a list of top-5 addresses that have had most fail requests:

0x6B9AA4087E8643E672CAAD55CEB8A78D547189EA 13667 fail txs

0x1F35924AE9B34BBD1DFA7E527964C430D5AFAB92 9174 fail txs

0x49C4460CC2366BD93D24974FF6813EF7FF4FB649 5644 fail txs

0xE1AB3DF91C8D871D59AE48D1DF18664173CB6297 4865 fail txs

0x4B15E04EBA58A46FB44829BBFE0D9CD82C149745 4830 fail txs

Who earned the most by playing the Cryptokitties game?

The list below enumerates top 10 players that have gained the most profit playing the game. The parameter called “Kitties_amount” is the number of cryptopets, that the user has had for the all period of gaming. Apart from the developers’ account the list includes the address of already mentioned player (ranked second) who has bought a kitty from himself for 600 Eth

These are accounts that are running at the most deficit

Business Model

The main unit of a decentralized system is token. The more it is in demand the more success the DApp has. The situation of such interdependence of supply and demand is a pyramid. The more users and assets are involved in the game, the more valuable this game becomes. Thus, the main goal for developers is to create an environment in which new technologies and new players are constantly involved.

What needs to be done to attract new users?

The first thing to do is to study when generally new accounts start using the DApp and find out the reason of such behavior. If to speak about Cryptokitties, the vivid interest is observed during the New Year time: New Year 2018 was the launch of the project and then that all-known “kitty boom”. A year after, New Year 2019 the game celebrated the first anniversary and the team used it as a good moment for giving-out of cryptocutties.

Advertising campaigns and special events related to special occasions to which users react through the application, allow to transform a passive player into a more involved one. Having the figures, one can build a marketing strategy and understand what time is the best to start it. Statistics in its turn allows to monitor user reaction and behavior during a particular campaign: which methods are called most often, the intense of user retention to the application, etc.

The second to be done is to analyze the periods ( time intervals, days of week) when the audience of the DApp is the most active and make prediction on further activities. These data allow to make some conclusions on user profile and behavior. For example, region, evening activity or during working hours, weekends or weekdays, on which days the turnover is higher, and which days is traffic. These metrics are of interest not only for the team of the project, but also for partners and competitors. If you understand the users of your business, then you better realize what kind of product they need the most.

The third is to single out the most active accounts of your competitors’ products ( the biggest profit, the most transactions, etc). They are most likely to have interest to your DApp, that’s why they are highly desirable to be airdropped from you. One more moment not-to-forget is to study the behavior of such users and analyze their nearest environment using the graph.