Cryptokitty raises $140,000 in auction for blockchain and art

Full disclosure: I joined the CK team recently after having been a fan, community member, and tool developer since shortly after they launched in December.

What very few people realize about CryptoKitties is the vibrant community of players and developers that has spawned around this game, and it makes the experience of collecting, breeding, and selling CryptoKitties very rich. One group made an app that lets you buy accessories like hats for your Kitties: built without permission or need for permission thanks to the open mature of the blockchain. I helped make KittyCalc.co after seeing huge demand (and user experience confusion) for my Kitty Genetics spreadsheet that let you input two Kitties to see what the chances for different traits in offspring would be. The community pieced together this breeding algorithm and cracked the genetic code for kitties within weeks of release, but that doesn’t make the game of trying to breed specific Kitties any less fun. It does let you make informed decisions so you can weigh your personal risk to reward ratio for each breed.

There’s a lot of subculture around Kitties—people collecting all black and white Kitties, people competing to breed the most adorable generation 100 kitties, people selectively breeding to breed the lowest generation Kitties possible with the most prestigious ancestry (so-called 8 diamond Kitties). Recently the community got together to raise tens of thousands of dollars for the Seattle Children’s hospital.

This auction, though, at the Ethereal Summit, some crazy to behold. As the article says, Christie’s appraised this Exclusive CryptoKitty + hardware wallet art piece at around 50 ETH, and the actual bidding brought it way higher. The proceeds support a great cause that the CK team believes in, and it’s one of the coolest CryptoKitties in the game (and id 127 is icing on the cake) so it was just really great to see.

I know I often come across as too-enthusastic-to-be-genuine, but I really just love this stuff in my core and can’t help sounding like this when I talk about things I love. Check my post history if you don’t believe me! I totally know also that CK is the easiest thing in the world to dismiss without giving any critical thought, but what made me fall in love was the devs DID give this a lot of critical thought before release, and have created a deep, meaningful experience (I’ve learned so much about Ethereum and the blockchain thanks to CK) behind a silly, fun premise.