Crypto Kitties is an Ethereum dapp where users can purchase, trade, and breed their own cats on the blockchain. It became well-known for causing serious transactional strain, and delays on the Ethereum chain in late 2017.

CryptoKitties has maintained its position as the second most popular game dapp, and has had a high rate of activity for over 9 months. It currently has around 3500 monthly users, and almost 800 ETH’s worth of transactional volume.

Over $25 million dollars worth of kitties have been sold to date!

The game is very simple, but has more complex features when you dig into it. Users can buy cats with the traits that they like, then breed them to produce new cats which have new traits formed from both the two kitties.

The blockchain allows for ownership and trading of the digital kitties. Each kitty is a digital item that is unique, and is owned by you. You can trade the kitty, sell it, or breed it in whatever way that you want.

It only costs around $1 or more, to purchase a new kitty to get started.

The cats will fetch prices based off the traits (or cattributes), their generation, whether it is a fancy cat with custom art, a purebred, a founder cat, or an exclusive cat.

Should You Buy and Flip a Crypto Kitty?

Some CryptoKitty users were able to time the market purrrfectly, and purchase their kitties before it had become a well known game. Then the market became extremely hot in December.

This was when some of the largest sales in the market occurred. The top sales of over $100,000, occurred in December of 2017.

Here is a picture of the cat that sold for over $100,000. (left)

The market has since cooled off after the craze, but as of August 2018, some kitties have sold for over $5000 just recently.

This website shows all of the top cryptokitty sales.

How to Buy Your First Crypto Kitty

If you are ready to buy your first crypto kitty, you will need to install the meta-mask plugin. Otherwise you can use the Brave browser which already has meta-mask installed.

Next, navigate to the website at CryptoKitties.co, pick the kitty you want, then press “buy”.

Finally, approve the transaction in meta-mask. That’s it! Your now the proud owner of your first CryptoKitty.

If you want to breed kitties, you might decide to purchase a kitty with certain traits (or cattributes).

To do this, browse through the kitty marketplace.

You can sort kitties by price, gen, age, cool down, and likes.

If you purchase a cat with desirable traits (called cattributes), you can breed them to produce more kitties with these traits.

Here is a trait chart, which shows how likely your cat will acquire a certain trait.

How to Breed Crypto Kitties

If you are trying to experiment for fun, you can buy two inexpensive cats and breed them. This will produce a mix of the two kitties, based on their cattributes.

Crypto kitties have no gender. This means their isn’t a need to acquire a female and male kitty. Any two cats can breed with each other.

Inexpensive kitties can be purchased for just a couple dollars each, but those with desirable traits can cost much more.

The cost to breed a crypto kitty is around .008 ETH, which translates to around $4. If you are siring with another user’s kitty, you will also have to pay a siring fee on top of it.

It can be lucrative to breed kitties with rare, desirable traits. Kitties with desirable traits can even be “sired“, or loaned out to other users to combine traits with another kitty.

Here is a trait chart, which shows how likely your cat will inherit a certain trait.

Breeding a Fancy Cat

There are some rare kitties called Fancy Cats, which are hand drawn cats that are limited in number.

These cats can be produced through the breeding of cats with certain catributtes, to create a fancy cat . If you breed two cats with these traits you have a certain percentage chance of creating a fancy cat.

There is only a limited number of each type of fancy cat that will ever exist, after which the only way to acquire them will be to purchase them from the marketplace.

Can you Make Money Selling Crypto Kitties?

The price of your kitties depends on the current popularity of the game.

During its peak in December of 2017, the game was extremely hot. This is when prices reached their all time highs. The Genesis Kitty (left) is very valuable because it is the first cat to ever be created in the game. It sold in Dec. of 2017 for over $100,000.

The peak of sale prices occurred in December of 2017, but the market has cooled since then. Recent sales, as of August, have still been as high as $5000.

Some might think this kitty-trading game is just a short-lived trend, but I think it may have a longer shelf-life than it might first appear.

The company has begun letting third party developers use the kitties in their apps and games. These third party apps include: CryptoPurr, Kitty Hats, and Kitty Battles.

The third party apps will create new features and interest for users to sell when the market is better.

The game has entered a less popular phase, which is the best time to invest. When the market becomes hot again, then it is time sell your kitties for a profit.