Is CryptoKitties decentralized?

The goal of the blockchain is decentralization. The goal of CryptoKitties is to teach people how to use the blockchain.

Like cats on catnip, the crypto community has gone a little crazy for CryptoKitties, and we really couldn’t be happier. Seeing the amazing adoption and interaction with CryptoKitties in such a short period of time was something we never anticipated, and we’re incredibly thankful to everyone who’s supported us so far.

With this level of adoption and attention comes plenty of feedback. We’ve seen a lot of incredibly positive support from the community, and many users have offered up valuable suggestions — many of which we’ve already implemented to improve the Cryptokitties experience.

Just like the blockchain we’ve built CryptoKitties on, the CryptoKitties dev team is committed to transparency with our community about how we do things, and why. To that end, we want to talk about one of the key innovations blockchain brings to the world: decentralization.

When we created CryptoKitties, our vision was to make the blockchain a little more approachable for everyone. For blockchain technology to be widely adopted, people need to understand how it works. We wanted to build a product that was fundamentally decentralized, while keeping some things centralized where it would result in a better user experience.

Two paramount aspects of CryptoKitties are decentralized: kitty ownership and genes. Both of these things are completely governed by smart contracts. The 256-bit genome of your kitties can’t ever be changed. Similarly, the ownership of a CryptoKitty can’t be changed unless the current owner explicitly grants permission by signing an Ethereum transaction with their private, cryptographic key.

So what is centralized? We created the front-end of CryptoKitties as a traditional web app to ensure a quality user experience, and to make the game more accessible for everyone. Imagine if we just released CryptoKitties tokens (and the ability to breed them or sell them) to the world? TBH, it wouldn’t be much fun, and it would be incredibly slow. That’s why we created the web app, the art, and everything that goes along with it.

We’ve also kept the release of new genes centralized, and kept the decentralized gene combination algorithm a secret. A fully decentralized system can’t hide any of this information and keeping these things a secret is what makes games like this fun. We look forward to the community’s reaction to some of the surprises we have planned.

Because we’ve decentralized some things, there is so much the community can create. We’d be ecstatic to see the community build games, art, or even entire ecosystems around the CryptoKitties architecture. We want apps to interpret CryptoKitties in ways that are meaningful to them. We don’t want to tell anyone how to be creative, but a kitty amusement park would be pretty sick. And are your cats competing in the 2020 CryptoKitty Games? No, because that hasn’t been built yet… You get where we’re going with this?

Completely decentralizing CryptoKitties would have resulted in a game that wasn’t as fun, and we would have crippled our efforts to bringing blockchain to the masses. CryptoKitties brings us one small step closer to widespread adoption of distributed ledger technology; we’re incredibly happy with the result.

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New to CryptoKitties? Head over to the website and learn first-hand about decentralization on the blockchain!