CryptoKitties: A synopsis

What’s going on here?

12 million US dollars: That’s how much money was just raised by a company building the virtual collecting game CryptoKitties. The game is based on the Ethereum blockchain and accounts for almost 14 percent of the current Ethereum network traffic.

What does this mean?

The game CryptoKitties, which was launched in November 2017, conquers the Internet — and, in addition to transactions worth the equivalent of almost three million US dollars, also ensures a high utilization of the Ethereum network on which it is based. In CryptoKitties, similar to baseball trading cards, players can buy, collect and trade digital kittens. Each cat has different characteristics, which they can pass on to their offspring. The aim of the game is to get kittens with very few but rare attributes.

CryptoKitties runs as a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, where each kitten represents a “token” in the blockchain, just like the cryptocurrency Ether. Every fifteen minutes a new “Generation 0” cat is born, offered for 1.5 times the average price of the last five cats (currently at about 10 ETH or $4500 per G0 cat). The price will fall indefinitely within the next 24 hours until the cat finds a new owner. According to the same principle (aka reverse auction), users can also offer their cats for…