According to a recent article on Bloomberg, this silly little game now accounts for 11% of all ETH transactions. It's only been running since November 28th and is already bogging down the network.
So far there have been 22,000 kitty sales in six days - that's a mere 3,666 kitties per day. Given its popularity, it won't be long before CryptoKitties consumes the entire processing capacity of the blockchain!
This episode does not bode well for the future of Ethereum as an application platform. Hundreds of apps are currently under development in the Ethereum space. The transaction capacity just isn't there to support them all. There's no easy fix either.
Companies planning on running mission-critical apps on Ethereum now have some serious rethinking to do. With millions at stake, I see most of these projects moving over to high-performance blockchains like EOS.
They won't have much of a choice.
Sources:
Image: Hell's Kitty - Vimeo