I’ve always said about this space: it’s so young and immature that we should be trying small, stupid things first so we can learn how to do it well. We did not expect it to be in the first week…”ĭan Finlay, MetaMask: “When I went to ETH Waterloo, I met this scrappy team who gave me a business card printed on the back of a Pokemon card. We were expecting to have to deal with things like scaling at some point.
We thought we’d caught all the bugs and issues. We soft launched an alpha at ETH Waterloo, the most basic version of the game possible on the Rinkeby Testnet. And I mean that in the metaphorical and, potentially, the literal sense. In their own words, here is the inside story on the CryptoKitties Congestion Crisis of 2017…īryce Bladon, Co-Founder of CryptoKitties: “Although we wouldn’t have pursued the CryptoKitties project if we didn’t want it to be a success, we did not expect it to catch fire quite like it did.
Perhaps even more importantly, the saga highlights the remarkably collaborative and cooperative nature of the blockchain space and developer community. In response to what was unfolding to be an industry-wide dilemma, an impromptu taskforce of Ethereum developers from projects like MetaMask, Infura, and Grid+ came together and joined the CryptoKitties team in formulating short-term optimizations and longer-term scaling solutions that not only alleviated the immediate danger, but laid out roadmaps towards a more functional future. Before long, the CryptoKitties craze had spiraled beyond anyone’s expectations- for better and worse.īy early December, CryptoKitties had turned viral sensation, sending prices for some kittens well into the six figures, earning slightly bemused mentions from across mainstream news media, and clogging up the Ethereum network with so many transactions - a sixfold increase in total network requests in the first week of December alone - that many feared the entire Ethereum blockchain would grind to a halt before it ever even had a chance to achieve its promise. Conceptually somewhere between Neopets and futures trading, the disarmingly simple CryptoKitties game captured imaginations with the emergent blockchain community and beyond. CryptoKitties users breed and trade unique digital kittens, upvote and engage with the community, and revel in the still-novel joy of a fully-functional application built on a distributed network. When Vancouver-based venture studio Axiom Zen launched CryptoKitties in October of 2017, it was intended to be a playful experiment of early stage blockchain technology.
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