Dragon was never resold—a strange fate for one of the most historically relevant NFTs ever. Newer NFTs such as
“The Merge,” a piece of digital art that sold for the equivalent of $92 million, left Dragon behind as the NFT market surged to record sales, totaling roughly $18 billion in 2021. Has the world simply moved on to newer blockchain projects? Or is this the fate that awaits all NFTs?
Blockchains, smart contracts, and cat genes
To understand the slow death of
CryptoKitties, you have to start at the beginning. Blockchain technology
arguably began with a 1982 paper by the computer scientist David Chaum, but it reached mainstream attention with the success of Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency created by the anonymous person or persons known as Satoshi Nakamoto. At its core, a blockchain is a simple ledger of transactions placed one after another—not unlike a very long Excel spreadsheet.
The complexity comes in how blockchains keep the ledger stable and secure without a central authority; the details of how that’s done vary among blockchains. Bitcoin, though popular as an asset and useful for money-like transactions, has limited support for doing anything else. Newer alternatives, such as
Ethereum, gained popularity because they allow for complex “smart contracts”—executable code stored in the blockchain.
“Before
CryptoKitties, if you were to say ‘blockchain,’ everyone would have assumed you’re talking about cryptocurrency”—Bryce Bladon
CryptoKitties was among the first projects to harness smart contracts by attaching code to data constructs called tokens, on the Ethereum blockchain. Each chunk of the game’s code (which it refers to as a “gene”) describes the attributes of a digital cat. Players buy, collect, sell, and even breed new felines. Just like individual Ethereum tokens and bitcoins, the cat’s code also ensures that the token representing each cat is unique, which is where the nonfungible token, or NFT, comes in. A fungible good is, by definition, one that can be replaced by an identical item—one bitcoin is as good as any other bitcoin. An NFT, by contrast, has unique code that applies to no other NFT.
There’s one final piece of the blockchain puzzle you need to understand: “gas.” Some blockchains, including Ethereum, charge a fee for the computational work the network must do to verify a transaction. This creates an obstacle to overworking the blockchain’s network. High demand means high fees, encouraging users to think twice before making a transaction. The resulting reduction in demand protects the network from being overloaded and transaction times from becoming excessively long. But it can be a weakness when an NFT game goes viral.
The rise and fall of CryptoKitties
Launched on 28 November 2017 after a five-day closed beta,
CryptoKitties skyrocketed in popularity on an alluring tagline:
the world’s first Ethereum game.
“As soon as it launched, it pretty much immediately went viral,” says
Bryce Bladon, a founding member of the team that created CryptoKitties. “That was an incredibly bewildering time.”
Sales volume surged from just 1,500 nonfungible felines on launch day to more than 52,000 on 10 December 2017, according to nonfungible.com, with many CryptoKitties selling for valuations in the hundreds or thousands of dollars. The value of the game’s algorithmically generated cats led to coverage in hundreds of publications.
What’s more, the game arguably drove the success of Ethereum, the blockchain used by the game.
Ethereum took off like a rocket in tandem with the release of CryptoKitties, climbing from just under $300 …….
Source: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-code-generation-language-models