A CryptoKittie trader has made $210,000 trading digital cartoon cats in collector markets, reports Kevin Pan at tokendaily.co.
The trader, known as “DapperKittie,” bought his or her first Bitcoin in 2012 for $20, and by 2017, was familiar enough with crypto to make strong early moves in CryptoKittie trading.
CryptoKitties are limited edition cartoon cats released onto the Ethereum blockchain last fall using a type of unique “non-fungible” (non-duplicable) Ethereum token called “ERC721.”
Trading of the popular cats temporarily clogged the Ethereum network in the days after the project hit exchanges. Ethereum miners reportedly had to increase gas limits (and therefore block size and transaction speeds) to accommodate CryptoKittie traffic.
Cryptokitties have various “cattributes” that can be passed to “offspring” in digital “breeding sessions.” “Limited genomes” mean that only 4 billion total CryptoKitties will every be “bred,” and first generation cats are imbued with a sort of biblical significance by the system. A week after the kitties hit exchanges, the first ever “Genesis Kitty” sold for 246 ETH, worth $117,712 US at the time.
The smart contract faucet governing CryptoKitties drips out one cat every 15 minutes.
“DapperKittie” focussed on picking up early generation “Founder Cats,” 100 rare cats created by the Axiom Zen company to fund the project’s early development.
Founder cats #2-10 were valued by the team at 50 ETH each, and cats 11-100 valued at 10 ETH.
“DapperKittie” saw that “Founder Kitties” were trading at a profit and picked up #42 and #7 founder kitties for 10 and 50 ETH respectively.
“Dapper” then watched another buyer snap up a large number of the remaining low number founder cats. “Dapper” quickly bought cats #45 and #47 before selling two of his low number founder cats at 3X or 30 ETH.
Cat hype and prices started to ramp, and Dapper sold the #42 cat for 75 ETH (7.5X) and then the #7 founder cat for 190ETH.
“Dapper” reinvested profits in more cat flipping, and used high gas fee bids to front run other traders when the network was clogged.
The CryptoKittie trading frenzy has died down in the early months of 2018, CryptoKittie creator and Vancouver-based company Axiom Zen raised have received $12 million in investment money thanks to the efforts of Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, and “DapperKittie” continues trading, more calmly now, from home.