CryptoKitties Maker on $100,000 Digital Cats: ‘It’s Crazy’

December 8th, 2017

Awake Goy

CryptoKitties, if you’re mercifully unaware, are digital collectibles that people buy and sell on the Ethereum blockchain for cryptocurrency. The game, which launched at the end of October, has become immensely popular in the last week or so and rare kitties are going for well over $100,000 USD.

It’s rather controversial since CryptoKitties are essentially digital Beanie Babies (pro: provably unique, con: don’t physically exist), that can cost a lot of money. CryptoKitties are really just bits of code on the blockchain, and two bits of code can be combined (or “bred”) to create a new and unique bit of code, which creates a new kitty. This code gives them defining visual characteristics, which may make them more or less valuable. Then, people buy and sell their cats. The game is so popular that the resulting traffic has been blamed for slowing down the entire Ethereum network recently.

“I honestly believe there is an Ethereum before and after CryptoKitties”

What you may not know, though, is that CryptoKitties aren’t a random lark by some fun-loving coders. The game is a product of Vancouver-based company Axiom Zen, and the company makes money on it. How much, exactly, is hard to say, but with more than $8 million USD spent on kitties so far according to one third-party site, the company has made at least $300,000 from the 3.75 percent cut it takes on every CryptoKitty trade alone. That’s not counting what the company makes from selling brand new kitties, which are minted every 15 minutes.

To get a sense of what CryptoKitties’ wild ride has been like from the inside, and if the team is worried about a CryptoKitty market crash, I called up Arthur Camara, an Axiom Zen software engineer on the CryptoKitty team in Vancouver.