The concept of the metaverse is not at all new; for the first time this term and the idea itself were introduced by the writer Neil Stevenson in the book Avalanche in 1992. Then, the idea, already familiar today, seemed distant and hardly feasible. Later, the film "The Matrix" was released, which began to develop the idea of digital reality and introduce the understanding of the concept of metaverse into everyday life. Game developers also did not stand aside, because it is the gaming industry that has all the makings to create a virtual world. In 2003, the SecondLife game was released, it became a full-fledged virtual world with social network components, the ability to own property and its in-game currency, which can be purchased for real money. This game lacked only one essential element, which, at the moment, makes the metaverse complete, safe and reliable - this is blockchain technology.
Today we will talk about the CryptoKitties platform, which became the first game created on the Ethereum blockchain and is the starting point in the development of metaverses that allow processing user data without intermediaries.
The CryptoKitties online game became available to users in November 2017. Its gameplay consists of buying, trading and breeding unique digital kittens. It can be compared to a Tamagotchi that needs to be taken care of, only in CryptoKitties players can earn from their pets.
CryptoKitties are NFTs based on the Ethereum blockchain under the ERC721 token standard. Before the advent of NFTs, blockchain tokens were only fungible, meaning any Bitcoin or Ethereum was indistinguishable from another. ERC721 allowed the creation of special, one-of-a-kind tokens, thanks to which the CryptoKitties project was created, becoming a pioneer in exploring the concept of digital scarcity. Each cat in the game is original, it gets its own digital genome, which is in a smart contract. You can take two CryptoKitties and perform breeding: thanks to the genome algorithm, create offspring with their own special traits (attributes). The appearance of a kitten is determined by a permanent genotype, which is recorded in the smart contract.
The smart contract itself becomes a guarantee that the new cat, obtained by crossing the other two, is really original and will always be stored in the Ethereum blockchain. This system allows you to create combinations of different cats to get new interesting and funny specimens.
>The gameplay started with hundreds of Founder Kitties, about a month every 15 minutes a new cat was born, which was in the "zero generation", their cost was calculated by the arithmetic average of the last five cats sold, multiplied by 1.5. This cost gradually decreased over 24 hours. And now new cats can only be bred through reproduction. Any player can put their pet up for auction by assigning a starting and final price. For example, if you request 2 ETH for a cat, and specify 0 ETH in the final cost, then after 12 hours the buyer will pay 1 ETH for it.
The process of breeding pets is called Siring. The owner of the cat offers his services in "digital conception" to the owner of the cat, paying ETH. As a result, one user has a cryptocurrency, and another has another pet.
It took the CryptoKitties project just a week after launch for its transactions to receive 13% of all transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. As of December 2017, it took users about $4.5 million to breed digital cats. The most expensive cat named Genesis cost $114,481, while the price of the most expensive real cat was only $41,435.
Getting into the CryptoKitties game is very simple: the user opens an account on the CryptoKitties trading platform and selects a cat that they like in appearance, according to the description, and satisfies in terms of financial capabilities. The player creates a crypto wallet, replenishes the balance with the required amount and buys the selected cat. Then he goes into the game from a computer or phone, guided by a link on the main site, and starts the gameplay to develop his cat. Later, it becomes possible to cross him with another pet and get offspring.
Despite the fact that since 2017 new projects have already appeared that have presented the possibilities of the metaverse much more extensively than virtual kittens, the CryptoKitties game is successfully functioning in 2022, attracting new users. This project is important because it showed what problems blockchain technology has. This concerns the growth opportunities of large gaming crypto platforms. For example, Ethereum can only support about 15 transactions per second, while the same Visa network processes 45,000. After the cat game was tested in real conditions, engineers began to develop solutions that should help the network process more transactions.
Today we talked about the first metaverse and plunged into the very beginning of the development of this industry. We hope that this material was useful for you.
