CryptoKitties

Meet CryptoKitty #896775. Her name is Dragon.

She has chestnut coloured eyes, her base colour is "cottoncandy". According to her bio she "bit Rebecca Black once" and finds spying on neighbours "exhilarating".

She is a digital cat and Tuesday someone bought her for the equivalent of $172,000.

Yep, that's $172,000 in US dollars, or 600ETH (Ethereum) to be precise. Welcome to 2018.

She is now owned by the user Rabono.

CryptoKitties are essentially digital collectables that you can breed and they're valuable in the way that, for example, a rare Magic: The Gathering Card is valuable. Or a rare baseball card. Essentially, since CryptoKitties are on the blockchain, Dragon (or 896775) is completely unique and cannot be replicated. The people behind CryptoKitties are slowly releasing "Gen 0" kitties, and they are capped at 50,000, but they can breed.

This means that Gen 0 cats tend to be the most valuable.

Which is why Dragon selling for $172,000 is extremely strange. For context, the average price paid for a CryptoKitty is $60. The median price is $9. If you look at previously huge CryptoKitty sales, they have one thing in common: They're all very old. The second most amount of money paid for a CryptoKitty was $110,000 back in December 2017. That was for CryptoKitty #18. The same day someone paid $107,000 for CryptoKitty #4. Both are Gen 0.

Also both are among the first CryptoKitties ever created and therefore have a high value. Dragon is different. She is #896775, a ninth-generation digital cat. It's hard to figure out why someone paid so much for her. Even if she is cute and bit Rebecca Black once.

CryptoKitties informed us it doesn't publicly comment on large sales or investments, but told us there are a number of potential reasons for investing so much in a seemingly worthless digital cat: "maybe there was a personal connection the buyer had to the cat or the seller.

"Maybe they really, really, liked how that CryptoKitty looked."



It is a very cute, digital cryptocurrency cat.

Update 8.26pm: Added comment from CryptoKitties.

Now playing: Watch this: What the heck is blockchain?

Blockchain Decoded: CNET looks at the tech powering bitcoin -- and soon, too, a myriad of services that will change your life.

Follow the Money: This is how digital cash is changing the way we save, shop and work.