Kitty Kads Critique FAQ
The Kitty Kads project always aimed to be as transparent as possible. Almost all the code was open sourced and there were regular engagements with the community.
To make things easy for people, I thought I’d list out all the potential questions people may have relating to why things were done a certain way.
Most of this was public information but it might’ve got lost across Twitter and Discord posts, so I thought I’d aggregate it here to make it easy to read through.
The first Kitty Kad is owned by Kitty Kad
Yes, on the first day the original Kitty Kad was created. On the rest, the others.
Kidding aside, the first NFT is literally Kitty Kad and is not intended to be traded. It was a fun quirk to involve the creator of the project in the collection.
In fact it was partially a test NFT with all the genes set to 0. It is also not included in any rarity calculations worked on by the community as mentioned here
The first ~100 NFTs were minted before public sale
These were for competition winners in the early days.
It was a fun time where there were only a few dozen people in discord and people could submit design ideas.
In exchange they would get a free Kitty Kad for entering and another one for any feature that made it into the final collection (which would include the feature they submitted).
There’s an archived discord channel that was dedicated to this for those interested :)
Unfortunately some of the original members have not appeared to claim their kitties so I’m still holding them for them
Kitty Kad owns a few hundred Kitty Kads
Yes, these were largely adopted at various times to give back to the community via future giveaways and projects and to those helping on the project. Some were also adopted as part of testing.
To date Kitty Kad still own most of those. Apart from a few test ones during the marketplace launch, none have been traded on marketplaces.
Some were given away as part of giveaways or as thanks for help with community moderation (about ~1 per week)
The first 5,000 Gen 0s sold for only 1 KDA
Yes, this was not a secret.
They sold out in a few hours so to allow more people to buy kitties the final 5,000 were sold at 5 KDA.
The final 5,000 Kitty Kad NFTs were meant to be minted by using Kitty Kad tokens but were instead minted for KDA
Yes, using Kitty Kad Tokens was the original plan.
However that assumed that the KDA raised from the mint would provide sufficient liquidity.
The price of KDA dropped and it made launching the Kitty Kad token less practical (to avoid huge price swings), so the second 5,000 were minted with KDA instead.
There are whales who minted 100s of kitties
Yes there are. Kitty Kads were intended to have an eventual open public mint.
Since anyone can make multiple wallets (Zelcore provides 6 already), limiting public mints for wallet does not stop people from overcoming the limit (it just adds an inconvenience).
To give non-whales a chance to purchase kitties during public mints, kitties were uploaded in batches at the start of the sales at random times in batches of ~100 and were able to be purchased in batches of 50.
WL members were able to buy kitties before public buyers during the first 5,000 mint
This is true. One of the benefits of the WL is that it allows people to buy before the public.
In practice about half of the first 5,000 were minted by primary + secondary WL members (100–200 accounts), and the other half were minted by the public.
In hindsight it could’ve been good to limit how much NFTs individual wallets could mint during WL.
At the time the priority was mostly about whether there were enough kitties for everyone in the WL to mint (which there was) and whether there was any demand.
Kitty Kads were transferred despite transfers not being public
Yes, transfers were only enabled for admin. All the transfers were done only for Kitty Kads controlled by the admin.
People have asked to have their kitties transferred by the admin from their wallets on their behalf, but out of integrity for the project these were not done — sorry to those where this could’ve helped recover lost NFTs :(
Kitty Kads have no provenance hash
There were no provenance hashes for Kitty Kads before mint.
It should be be noted that
- they were revealed instantaneously after mint, which reduces the need for a provenance hash
- the genes for a Kitty Kad control how its displayed, which were put up before mint
- provenance hashes were not mentioned for any Kadena project or standard at the time of mint
With Kitty Kads you just have the ID and genes on the chain
Yes, this is similar to how things work on other chains (i.e. ERC-721 on Ethereum)
For Kitty Kads, the ID uniquely identifies the Kitty Kad and the genes control how its displayed
Kitty Kads don’t store the image on chain
No they don’t, most projects don’t store anything besides a hash either.
Kitty Kads don’t store a hash of the image on chain
This is true. The plan is to upload all the hashes on chain later and link to IPFS.
At the time of creation, Kitty Kads had genes to determine how they’re displayed so a hash wasn’t added. This is not perfect and is addressed in another question, so in hindsight it would’ve been good to add.
For Gen 1 kitties it is not possible to upload hashes now as the image is not known ahead of time.
To keep things easy, the plan was to do it all in bulk after Gen 1s are fully created for Gen 0s also, but this can be done in stages.
Kitty Kad rarities aren’t stored on chain
Yes, in general the whole concept of rarities was left to the community to decide
Kitty Kads features aren’t stored on chain
Only thing stored on chain related to features are the genes.
The genes are then used to generate features and are stored on chain.
The server code was kept private (discussed elsewhere in this page) to avoid people gaming the system but will be open sourced later (at the moment it is simply trusting the project)
To allow for breeding, features and their hashes cannot not be uploaded beforehand for Gen 1s as they will be generated dynamically on chain.
It could’ve been possible to store a provenance hash for Gen 0s, however provenance hashes were not discussed in the community at the time when Gen 0s were available and they were introduced as an extension to Marmalade by Babena.
How Kitty Kad images are shown are controlled by the admin
Yes, at the moment a server converts genes -> images. This is not secret and was on GitHub
This was originally done for Gen 0s to help prevent people from seeing the NFTs before they were minted. Whenever someone queried the server, it checked the blockchain if the NFT id was actually minted and would then return an image.
This was done to avoid a “reveal” and allow people to instantly see their NFTs. In hindsight there are probably other ways this could have been done. As mentioned above, in the future the images are planned to be stored on IPFS.
For Gen 1s there will still need to be a server to convert genes -> image as the Gen 1s will be generated on chain and cannot be uploaded before hand.
The server for generating Kitty Kad images is not open source
Yes, this is the only live code that is not open sourced.
The reason for not open sourcing yet is to avoid people reverse engineering how genes are used to create Kitty Kads and gaming the system.
Eventually the code will be released after Gen 1s have been minted. This hide+reveal is similar to how Crypto Kitties did things.
The admin can modify any on chain data anytime
Yes, this is an issue for all current live projects on Kadena. This is discussed in another Kitty Kad medium article here.
A Kitty Kad had it’s gene data modified
From memory, one or two were modified before they were minted.
As mentioned above, the NFTs were uploaded in batches. There was a copy/paste error which would’ve resulted in duplicate Kitty Kads (the gen 0s were all meant to be unique).
To fix this, the genes were modified on chain. As mentioned above this happened before it was minted.
Kitty Kads had some metadata updated after launch
Some kitties had missing metadata around dimple and eye colors which was updated and returned correctly on the website.
The images were not changed and no on-chain data was changed.
Kitty Kad rarities changed
There was no official rarity list, however different people put out their own ranking.
As part of fixing the metadata (mentioned above), some kitties had the metadata used for rarities updated. As a result, the people that worked on the rarity lists also updated their metadata.
Kitty Kads aren’t on Marmalade
They never claimed to be. Kitty Kads launched before Marmalade this was mentioned multiple times in Medium articles too (1, 2, 3)
Kitty Kads aren’t on any official NFT standard on Kadena
Yes, they launched in the time between when poly-fungible-v1 was live and Marmalade was about to be confirmed.
To avoid unnecessary migration efforts between standards, poly-fungible-v1 was not supported at launch and Kitty Kads were intended to migrate to Marmalade. However there are various reasons why Marmalade is not suitable for Kitty Kads in its current state.
However something doesn’t have to follow an official NFT standard to be considered an NFT or for it to be trade-able on exchanges.
The admin knew what kitties would look like before mint
Yes, this is true for every project live and planned on Kadena at the moment.
Uploading a provenance hash does not stop the team from knowing which NFT ids correspond to which images and traits.
For now its about trusting the projects
There are however ways that gaming of the system by the admin telling “insiders” which NFT ids to buy which will be discussed in a community article.
There is no DOX
That’s right and it adds risk to the project.
However, since the NFTs have sold out, there have been
- multiple written tutorials published on babening.io
- multiple video tutorials done in collaboration on YouTube
- small “funds” for developers and creators in Kadena
- regular updates on medium about bigger topics
- monthly updates on Twitter and Discord summarizing small changes
- multiple proposals on and discussions with the Kadena team on GitHub (1, 2, 3)
- the dev is one of the most active users on GitHub helping with Pact / Kadena
It is up to everyone to decide how comfortable they feel with the project and team in the end.
People can trade Kitty Kad NFTs to artificially hike the price up
Yes they can, however they would pay a 3% fee to the project.
There is nothing stopping the admin from trading their own NFTs to hike the price up as they would keep the 3% fee and is left up to trust in the project.
Kitty Kads caused world hunger
This one is harder to disprove, but Kitty Kad donated a few thousand dollars to humanitarian issues caused by war and protecting wild cats
