In the late evening of June 2nd, 2018, KittyClock, the program that releases Generation 0 kats, got a bit out of control and released a whole bunch of Gen 0 duplicate kitties. This should not have been possible, yet two different kitties got cloned multiple times each, one after another, with identical appearance and genes. When I logged in to check the Gen 0 market, it looked like this:
The prices of the kitties were much higher than the ones shown in the screenshot, somewhere in the range of 0.14-.16 ETH per kitty. This screenshot was taken the next day, without refreshing the browser, hence the wrong price is shown.
Trying to understand what was happening, I began going through the pages of Gen 0 kitties that were not loading and realized that something was wrong. CryptoKitties Discord was my next stop. It was kind of chaotic, everyone was asking what happened and no one really knew the answer. The only thing that was known is that Kitty clock hit a bug and had to be paused. All the Gen 0 cloned kitties were available for purchase at that time. Hundreds.. maybe thousands of cloned kitties:
Without thinking much I decided to buy a few of these clones and started transferring ETH to my wallet. As the ETH transfer was in progress I saw in chat someone mentioning that a bot-player (KittyMittens) bought hundreds of these clones. I thought that by the time my ETH arrives I would be too late for the party. After waiting, what seemed ages at that time, my ETH finally arrived and I was able to scoop a couple of each of the clones, both pairs with consecutive numbers 😎:
Kitty #787448 Kitty #787447 Kitty #787379 Kitty #787378
Just a few minutes after I bought these, all of the clone kitties were purchased and no longer available for sale. The next day I found out that the CK team purchased back most of the clones (about 90%). All the clones purchased back by CK are now redirecting to a 404 error page (example: https://www.cryptokitties.co/kitty/787391). There isn't a way to delete or destroy their blockchain tokens, but access to the page can be disabled, which is what happened here.
A member of the kitties team said that the future of these kitties was uncertain:
After CK team purchased back most of the clones, there were only 21 kitties left from the first clone kind and 17 of the second kind. Only few of these are on sale now starting at 1ETH each. I will be holding mine for now and see what happens.
Here is a snapshot of the CK team buying back most of these cats:
Source: http://www.rolldice.club/cryptokitties/wkt_klist.php?period=last24h
Since only very few of these remained in the hands of the players, these clone kitties became very rare bug-kats and might become valuable to collectors who are interested in misprints or bug kitties (more about this in another post).
Although things were on fire for a bit, it turned out to be a fun evening and I am very glad that I was able to pick up a few of these rare clone-kats. 😁
Looking forward to an official statement from the CryptoKitties team regarding this incident.