The cryptocurrency market is, without doubt, the most lucrative and profitable market in the history of the world’s economy. Thanks to the development of blockchain technologies, it is possible to conceive of many applications that go beyond the purely economic sphere.
The exponential growth rate of blockchain adoption, the constant technological advances and the high levels of profitability associated with the world of distributed ledger technologies, made it evident that sooner or later, game developers would join this technological revolution to take advantage of its benefits.
With the introduction of the Ethereum platform, smart-contracts made it possible to develop a new gaming technology in which players could tokenize their assets and assign real value to them.
Not only that, because the blockchain is immutable and auditable in real time, the possibility of hacker-proof game development has become a reality. How can you download a cracked DLC if the platform you run your game on would never even accept the existence of that content?
One of the first gaming ventures to unite the best of both worlds (gaming and blockchain) was CryptoKitties: a fairly simple but innovative game. Players have kittens that they can sell, buy, breed and raise. The innovative aspect is that each kitten consists of a smart-contract that makes it immutable, indivisible, impossible to clone and by the way they are designed – as an ERC-721 token – players actually have to buy Ethereum in order to have them.
Since its inception, the game has registered at least $23,266,439.10 or 42223.19 ether in kittens sold[1], with some kittens exceeding $100,000 in value. Its success was so overwhelming that within less than a month it clogged up the Ethereum network[2] forcing many tokens to postpone their market launch – the reactions were a mix of wonder and amazement – Reddit user J-Sand41 summed up in a few words what may have been the global feeling:
“So my first reaction was.
WTF. The mighty, revolutionary ETH blockchain brought to its knees by ONE cat game.”
The game quickly surpassed the team’s expectations. One of the game’s co-founders, Ben Giang told Fortune:[3]
“We did some models and we some made spreadsheets and had everyone take a guess at how many users we’d see. We ended up hitting every one of those numbers within the first three days,”
In the last few hours, Cryptokitties news has surfaced again as the company behind it, Axiom Zen opened their first investment round. Cryptokitties counts on the support of external investors, who are more than willing to put their money “in their good hands.” According to reports from their official medium account official medium account[4] the team has received at least 12m in funding from a group of investors[5] including Andreessen Horowitz (with a portfolio of investments that includes dozens of successful startups such as Facebook, Twitter,
