What Happened to CryptoKitties? Inside the NFT Game That Started the Whole Crypto Gaming Craze

Axiom Zen showed the game at ETHWaterloo on 19 Oct 2017 and opened it to the public on 28 Nov 2017, per Wikipedia's CryptoKitties entry. The pitch was almost stupidly simple. You owned a cartoon cat that lived as a token on Ethereum, bred it with another cat, and got a kitten whose "cattributes" came from a 256-bit genome.

No boss. No levels. No win screen. Just cats. Wikipedia's entry notes the game has no goal, and it didn't matter.

On 2 Dec 2017 the first cat, Genesis, sold for 246.9255 ETH, roughly $117,712 at the time (Wikipedia again). Then the ape-in started. A Frontiers in Physics study of roughly five million CryptoKitties transaction records (Jiang and Liu, March 2021) found players poured in during the game's 10th to 18th days. Most were gone within a month, about the attention span of a meme coin.

Every breed and every sale was an on-chain transaction, and in December 2017 the congestion hit before Ethereum had room for it.

Consensys, whose developers worked the incident, measured a sixfold increase in total network requests in the first week of December 2017 (write-up published 20 Feb 2018). Infura's Michael Wuehler told the same write-up his daily requests went from about 2 billion to over 4 billion overnight.

How much of Ethereum was cats? Nobody agrees on the number. Reported shares varied by outlet and by what was counted, with CNBC's 6 Dec 2017 report at the high end. I'd trust the sixfold jump more.

The real pain was stuck transactions. Anything sent with too little gas just sat there, and Wuehler said the fees to buy a kitty could cost more than the kitty itself.

The fixes came from all sides. MetaMask's Dan Finlay added a button to resubmit a stuck transaction at a higher gas price. Co-founder Bryce Bladon said CryptoKitties added a live network-status readout and a transaction queue. Miners eventually raised the gas limit, per Wikipedia.

So it never "took down" Ethereum. It made it slow and pricey for everyone, which is a funnier failure.

One thing outlived the mess. The ERC-721 standard, the NFT spec created on 24 Jan 2018, names CryptoKitties in its backwards-compatibility notes as compatible with an earlier version.

The Frontiers paper splits the mania into four stages:

"Serenity" is a very polite academic word for "the party's over."

The authors tie the rise to media attention and the fall to oversupply, thin profit margins, lopsided holdings and the chain's own limits, gas fees and congestion included. Breeding was the entire loop, and breeding made more cats. Co-author Xiaofan Liu told IEEE Spectrum (10 Aug 2022): "With more people came more kitties."

Supply also bunched up at the top. By April 2020 the study's Gini coefficient for kitties held per address had passed 0.8 (0 is perfectly even, 1 is one wallet holding everything). That's heavily lopsided.

Then there's gas. IEEE Spectrum quotes Newzoo analyst Mihai Vicol putting fees at "anywhere from $100 to $200 per transaction". The piece doesn't date that figure and ties it to the viral peak, so it's his estimate, not a chart reading. Paying that for a cat worth less than the fee is a tax, not a game loop.

By August 2022, IEEE Spectrum reported, a day's total sales value was often under $10,000.

Yes, sort of. Just not as the 2017 game you remember.

In October 2024, Decrypt reported that CryptoKitties was back as a Telegram idle game, CryptoKitties: ALL THE ZEN!, with a "play-to-eggdrop" model where progress feeds airdrops on Flow, pitched as a preview of a broader revival on that chain. If that sounds like a token economy in a cat costume, our guide to how play-to-earn works covers the mechanics.

On 22 Apr 2025, Decrypt covered the Meowcoins, seven tokens on Flow. Dapper Labs VP of Product Arthur Camara said earlier gaming experiences "do not survive because they were not fun." The same piece put Telegram-game tokens Notcoin, Catizen and Zoo down 92% to 94% from their peaks as of that date. Company thesis, delivered by the company.

CryptoKitties 2026 status check (as of 28 Sep 2026)

• Verified: the ALL THE ZEN official site presents the game as live. Its latest listed event is the "Lucky Golden Event" on 12 Feb 2026, and nothing newer is listed, so "live" is as far as I'll go.

• Verified (one source): the 2017 Ethereum collection still trades on OpenSea.

• Reported by Dapper Labs: 140K+ players in December 2024 per the official roadmap, and 250K+ players per product lead Alan Carr in an OpenSea interview dated 15 Apr 2025. No 2026 count found.

• Unverified: the classic breeding game. The original cryptokitties.co is still up, but we could not confirm breeding works. A 22 Jul 2026 Coinranking review says it "still runs fine" and shows no evidence we could check. File under maybe.

Are CryptoKitties worth anything now?

As of 28 Sep 2026, OpenSea's CryptoKitties collection page listed a floor price of 0.0007 ETH across 2,025,747 kitties and 122,414 owners, with $1,206.41 in 24-hour volume.

That's a residual market, probably mostly collectors and nostalgia. Put it next to Genesis at 246.9255 ETH and you've got the whole arc in two numbers. It's a dated snapshot, not a call.

A question that ranks for this topic assumes the developers sold the company cheap. The record says otherwise. Dapper Labs spun out of Axiom Zen on 20 Mar 2018 with $12M led by Union Square Ventures and a16z, then raised $15M led by Venrock in November 2018 (both per Wikipedia).

Dapper announced plans in March 2021 to move CryptoKitties to the Flow blockchain. Whether the classic collection ever fully moved, we couldn't confirm.

Dapper Labs is still operating. On 14 May 2026 it stopped issuing new NFL ALL DAY NFTs while keeping that marketplace open.

It sold ownership before there was a game, and I think the genre has been relearning that ever since.

Axie Infinity put a token economy on top of breeding and ran the same arc at far bigger scale, as our Axie Infinity crash timeline lays out. STEPN did it with sneakers. DeFi Kingdoms tried a deeper game on top of its token. For the wider wreckage, see the web3 gaming crash.

Nearly nine years on, the cats are still listed and still cheap. Whether anyone is still breeding them, I couldn't tell you.