Think of this like owning a plot of land. This means that every single token is unique and can be independently verified. This doesn’t matter as whatever note they give you it will have the same value and can be spent in the same way.ĮRC-721 tokens are non-fungible. If you lend someone a $20 note, when they pay you back it probably won’t be with the exact same note that you gave them. However, ERC-20 tokens cannot be differentiated from each other which means they are fungible.Ī real-world example of a fungible asset is the U.S. There are many variations of ERC, with the most popular being ERC-20. ERC stands for Ethereum Request for Comments. However, as people are prepared to pay money for them, CryptoKitties are actually ‘blockchain assets’.ĬryptoKitties are created on top of the Ethereum blockchain and they are ERC-721 tokens. Well, it’s not! CryptoKitties have no value outside of the network, nor can they be traded with other digital tokens or coins on third-party exchanges. People often make the mistake that holding CryptoKitties is the same as owning a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Litecoin.

In some cases, people have paid more than $100,000 dollars for a single cat!ĭo you remember the Pokémon card game, where you would buy a packet and hope to get a rare card like Charizard? Well, CryptoKitties is very similar as when new cats are created they are randomly generated from a smart contract code! Is CryptoKitties a cryptocurrency?

Some cats are much rarer than others and these can be sold for a lot of money. Everyone on the planet has a unique internal DNA which is never the same as anybody else’s, which is the same with CryptoKitties! The technology that supports this is known as the Genetic Algorithm, which I will explain in more detail later.Īlthough CryptoKitties is called a game, you can’t really do anything with them other than buy, breed and sell them.

There are also different CryptoKitty genders, which take their names from a male or female horse! A male CryptoKitty is called a Sire and females are called Dames! Every cat that is created is unique, which includes different colored fur, eyes, and hair! The founders wanted to create an Ethereum game that would allow anyone in the world to own virtual cats that were created from a smart contract.

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