
As part of the partnership, Curry was given three CryptoKitties with special imagery, the first of which he put up for auction. In May 2018, CryptoKitties launched their first celebrity-branded CryptoKitty with Stephen Curry, an American professional basketball player. The investment round was led by New York based Union Square Ventures and San Francisco based Andreessen Horowitz. On March 20, 2018, it was announced that CryptoKitties would be spun off into its own company, Dapper Labs, and raised $12 million from several top venture capital firms and angel investors. Other features like cool down times are not passed down but are instead a function of the ‘generation’ of the offspring, which is one more than the ‘generation’ of the highest ‘generation’ attribute. There are a total of 12 ‘cattributes’ for any cat, including pattern, mouth shape, fur, eye shape, base color, accent color, highlight color, eye color, and optional wild, environment, ‘purrstige’ and ‘secret’. Several traits can be passed down from the parents to the offspring.

The virtual cats are breedable and carry a unique number and 256 bit distinct genome with DNA and different attributes (cattributes) that can be passed to offspring. As of December 2, 2017, Genesis, the first high selling cat was sold for ETH246.9255 (~US$117,712) on that day. A test version of CryptoKitties was unveiled at ETH Waterloo on October 19, 2017, an Ethereum hackathon. The company released some of the art under a new ‘Nifty’ license that lets players use the image of their CryptoKitty in a limited way. However, the CryptoKitty art is not on the blockchain and is instead owned by Axiom Zen. Users can interact with their CryptoKitties, having the ability to buy, sell, and sire (breed) them. CryptoKitties cannot be replicated and cannot be transferred without the user’s permission even by the game developers. Each is unique and owned by the user, validated through the blockchain, and its value can appreciate or depreciate based on the market. Each CryptoKitty is a non-fungible token (NFT). The game’s popularity in December 2017 congested the Ethereum network, causing it to reach an all-time high in the number of transactions and slowing it down significantly.ĬryptoKitties operates on Ethereum’s underlying blockchain network.

It is one of the earliest attempts to deploy blockchain technology for recreation and leisure. This article is a part of NFT Wiki on ĬryptoKitties is a blockchain game on Ethereum developed by Canadian studio Dapper Labs that allows players to purchase, collect, breed and sell virtual cats.
