Today I'm writing about one of my favourite whimsical dApps, cryptokitties. I find the project interesting for a number of different reasons, the biggest of which is my view that it abstracts a lot of crypto aspects into a cute collectible kitty digital asset package. I also really appreciate the experimentation with newer token standards like ERC721 which is a non-fungible token(NFT), and the fact that they exposed some of the issues with smart contract generated congestion on the ethereum network through sheer popularity and traffic. I had bought a few Gen 0 kitties a while back and tried breeding a few just to see what the platform was like, but left them alone for a while as, for one, I was spending too much ETH on kitties in a short time... and also because I had to transfer my associated MetaMask account to my PC as my macbook's wifi card has died on me AGAIN. But I could go on about that another time...
Nonetheless, I got back into my cryptokitties account and thought I'd experiment with breeding a little more. However, after you have a few kitties and don't sell any in the marketplace, you end up with mostly related kitties in your possession, and that's a no-go for breeding on the platform. Also, most of my kitties had pretty standard cattributes, and I was thinking of trying out the concept of hiring a sire for my cats to get some new genes and hopefully mewtations. Not that kitties with standard cattributes are any less collectible or lovable, but the cryptokitties team seems to also be encouraging to some extent, a pokemon-esque "gotta catch em all" feeling with the addition of the cat codex. I also like this addition, as I was already using resources like cryptokittydex to get some info on different cattributes already.
One other thing that made me wait a couple of days to breed these though was the temporarily increased breeding fee implemented by the cryptokitties team. I actually think this is a really good way to deal with the congestion on the ethereum network, and incentivised waiting to breed kitties until the network becomes less congested, and gas fees for all parties are cheaper as a result. I mean, it worked on me to wait until the breeding fee was back to 0.08 ETH.
Anyway, I decided to see if there were any reasonably priced fancy cats up for sale or siring, as this was an aspect that I hadn't tried before, and I definitely hadn't purchased any fancy cats yet. I found a gen 4 Kitty Pride that was available (and is up for sire again as I write this), and picked one of my cuter little kitties Lemon Drop who has ragdoll fur and googly eye jewels and ended up with Icy Soulsearcher with a garnet color jewel, and new cattributes to me: mauveover base color, alien eye shape, birman fur, and an icy accent color. Pretty neat traits!!
Icy Soulsearcher
I wasn't going to stop this experiment with fancy cats that quickly though, and I also found page1r1 who was on offer for siring, and I matched them up with my kitty Charlie. The pairing got me this lovely looking character who has so far remained nameless awwwww. Slightly crazy eyed, this little kitty had a few new cattributes too - jewels for parakeet eye color, ragdoll fur, and cottoncandy base color.
awwwww it's got no name yet :(
Do you want to help name this last crazy parakeet eyed kitty? Drop me a suggestion in the comments! Also feel free to let me know if you'd like to take any of my cats off my hands, I don't need to keep experimenting and keeping them all to myself to become a digital crazy cat person...
I may also write about some of the more technical background aspects of cryptokitties at some point, the importance of the ERC721 token standard and other aspects, but that's it for now. Hope you enjoyed and maybe learned a little from my experimentation with fancy cats too.