Cryptokitties went for shopping

Stefan Grasmann
The Startup
Published in
3 min readJul 14, 2018

Yesterday, July 13th 2018, Wysker - the shopping experience start-up from Berlin - started their “Awakening campaign”. From now on you can activate your very own shopping cat on Wysker’s website. Every now and then a new virtual cat (wysker) awakes and you can claim it to be yours. I was lucky and got cat number 26. If you want to claim your own wysker, just follow this link and make it a sibling to mine.

But what’s behind? Wysker wants to reinvent our mobile shopping experience. Watch this video to get an impression:

It’s slick, it’s fast — experience shopping for “generation Snapchat”.

They also have a sharp focus on privacy, protecting their users’ data from advertisers. Add a token-economy, which is also used to incentivize an advertising network (planned for 2019).

Wysker had their Token Launch late last year. They were the primary reason why I started to get into this crypto world, as you can read here. Their start was quite rough:

  • They were affected by the Parity bug. A big part of the Ether invested into the token launch are still locked down and inaccessible.
  • App v1 want live on Google PlayStore in February, but Apple wasn’t accepting it for iOS, so their huge marketing campaign on Time Square went somewhat unnoticed. It’s still worth a glimpse:

But the team is totally convinced to succeed.

They went on with this crazy treasure hunt, gripping all of their community for weeks. According to their news channel on Telegram they also managed to get their approval by Apple for their app in version 2.0, which is about to launch in 4 weeks from now. It will use Artificial Intelligence to create shopping stories — inspired from the story features on Snapchat and Instagram, as you can read here in this background story.

You can also find a nice summary about Wysker on Reddit.

The Awakening campaign

Yesterday Wysker launched their awakening campaign. Users can claim their own “shopping cat”, called a wysker.

Think of the wysker as a blend between virtual Tamagotchis and Cryptokitties.

You can claim one wysker to be yours, you give it a nice name and need to register via email. Each successfully claimed wysker gets one WYS token (attached to his/her wysker) and another WYS token for each referral. Referred wyskers become “siblings”. One WYS token isn’t much — currently worth 5 cents as of July 2018. But the team also elects a winner wysker to win many more tokens. There have also been hints that it would be beneficial to be fast and get a wysker with a low number — another gamification aspect for sure.

I’d be happy if you’d give it a try. If you create your wysker via this link we’d become virtual siblings. ;-)

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to be an investment advice of any sort. Do your own research and search for professional support if you intend to invest in one of the projects mentioned in this article.

Further reading: If you liked this story, you might also want to check out my earlier work about “Democratizing the digital markets” , my “Blockchain vNext series” or “The hidden power of Utility Tokens”.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 344,974+ people.

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Stefan Grasmann
The Startup

Blockchain enthusiast. Driving Thought Leadership @zuehlke_group to the next level. Innovator | Strategic Advisor | Networker | Speaker.