Cryptokitties: The Future is Meow

Everybody goes crazy for kitties and this is not a big news.

We all have seen at least one time in our life a video of a cat acting funny. If you’ve never laughed at cute fluffy kitty discovering the world, you can surely catch up with this two hours long funny cat compilation or you can keep reading and discover what the CryptoKitties are.

This is one, and is called Green Legend .

Make your choice.

The first Decentralized Ledger Game

CryptoKitties are just like any kind of physical or digital game based on the principle of collecting more and more valuable pieces or items available, depending on your generation you can find different examples. I personally remember myself holding like a treasure a deck of Pokèmon cards, now kids have probably evolved and are relying on Pokèmon Go to Catch ’em All!

But the fact that you’re collecting cats that basically do nothing, instead of incredible Pokèmons that will protect you from Team Rocket associates, is not the key difference between the two games.

The former one is de facto the world’s first game built on the Ethereum network and this means that nobody will never be able to take your cats away from you, unless you sell them. There is no company that can suddenly shut down and leave you with the emptiness of losing your digital assets, and there’s no bully, way bigger than you, that will force you to give him your valuable cards.

When I say that is the first Ethereum-based game, I know that there are several other gambling games like poker or lottery you can play, but Cryptokitties represents the first real application that can be called a real game in which the author cannot change the rules of the game once launched.

There is no need to tell that the game has been a sudden success among the crypto-community, so we can claim that the viral power of kitties can penetrate the hearts of finance sharks and geeks, or maybe the fact that Gen0 kitties (first once created) are now traded around 300ETH, roughly 300.000 USD, at the time of writing.

Only one day after the public launch (28th Nov) CryptoKitties transactions were consuming more gas (the internal pricing for running a transaction or contract in Ethereum) than the main exchange EtherDelta and after six days the CryptoKitties staff was forced to increase birthing fees in order to allow the kittens to born on time.

Ok, you’re probably confused and are now anxious to play this game, so let’s see how it actually works.

How to start

The first thing you need to do is to download Metamask, which is at the moment the only digital wallet you can use to make your first purchase.

50.000 “Gen0” cats or Clock Cats, as they’re called, will be distributed automatically via smart contract at a rate of one cat every 15 minutes and sold by auction, but you can already buy cats of following generations from other users on the marketplace.

Choose your favourite one and make it breed

All cats have a phenotype determined by an immutable genotype that gives them a unique appearance. In fact, when I said that they don’t do anything I was completely wrong, they can breed and generate new kittens! These new collectibles, that are a genetic combination of their parents, pop out from eggs, and this is weird since the cats I used to know didn’t lay down eggs, but is fun and the genetic mixtures can be very creative.

Before pairing, you need to select the gender of your cat, one needs to act as the sire, the other as the mother. The former will need a recovery period, while the latter incubates the kitten during a time and can’t engage in another pairing.

You will be able to make your cats pairing as much as you want, but the more they breed the longer the recovery and the gestation periods.

A groundbreaking use case

In the last decade digital goods are seeing a positive valuation trend, with people selling their characters or accounts for thousands of dollars (have a look at Clash of Clans profiles sold on PlayerAuctions), but the online marketplaces are limited to video games and lack of any security, so that hackers, cheaters and developers can influence the ecosystem easily.

CryptoKitties solve the three main problems of digital collectibles:

- Central Issuing Authority: the author can stop the creation of new products or remove them, this of course would diminish the value of the digital collectibles. Using Ethereum network this issue disappears.

- Provider Dependency: if the author ceases to exist your assets will disappear with him. CryptoKittes are not dependent on the existance of an issuing authority.

- Lack of function: like art masterpieces, digital collectibles don’t have to have a function or a meaning, they are just held as a thing of beauty and enjoyable asset.

Everyone agrees that Cryptokitties are a splendid use case of the blockchain technology, making it approachable for the everyday consumer bringing a widespread interest and knowledge. As the CryptoKitties Team members say, this game is a demonstration that the future can be changed having fun with it.

Nobody can say if CryptoKitties are here to stay, like all things related to blockchain the future is uncertain, but the potential is enormous.

If you now feel the typical fear of missing out an opportunity of investment, if you just fell in love with these cats, or, like me, are allergic to real ones, buying your first CryptoKitty is a good way to start exploring the fuzzy world of the blockchain.