In general, the G0 cats are the most rare ones, mainly because they can bread (still rare) G1 kitties, which can in turn create (somewhat rare-ish) G2 cats, and so on. The most expensive CryptoKitten so far was the so-called Genesis kitty, which was the first cat that has been generated ever. The owner of the Genesis cat changed hands for about 117,000 US dollars. You can read more about the game in the FAQ’s and follow instructions to participate.

Why should I care?

The bigger picture: The game already has a significant impact on the utilization of the Ethereum network — and on the players’ wallets. In total, sales of the kittens amount to nearly 24 million US dollars. According to statistics from the ETH Gas Station, CryptoKitties was responsible for more than 13 percent of the transactions in the Ethereum network shortly after its launch. Due to the ever increasing traffic, the developers of CryptoKitties already had to increase the fees for the birth of a new cat. The hype and number of transaction has since cooled of a bit, but this congestion of the Ethereum network still underlines the urgency of proper scaling solutions for the Ethereum protocol.

Even if one may very well question the meaningfulness of the game, there is no doubt that the cute animals could also inspire many new people to get exposed to the blockchain industry.

For investors: Through the recent success of CryptoKitties, a lot of attention is on the inherent scalability issues of Ethereum, which experienced a significant congestion in the transaction mempool and therefore an overall throttling of the network. The ability to handle a high amount of transactions has always been a topic of discussion amongst Ethereum investors and users, but thus far, there was no application actually bringing the network to its limits. This has changed now. Proper scaling solutions need to be implemented sooner rather than later and this cat-situation just increased the urgency (and maybe decreased the time for proper development). Some companies actively exploring the blockchain space might take this as an opportunity to evaluate competing platforms for decentralized applications / smart contracts such as Stratis, NEO or EOS. On the other hand it could turn out to be beneficial for the Ethereum network, as the developers are now forced to bring the networks scalability to the next level.