The Spectacular Collapse of Cryptokitties

Abstract

On 4 September 2018, someone known only as Rabono bought an angry cartoon cat named Dragon for 600 ethers - an amount of Ethereum cryptocurrency worth about US $170,000 at the time, or $745,000 at the cryptocurrency's value in July 2022. • It was by far the highest-priced transaction yet for a nonfungible token (NFT), the then-new concept of a unique digital asset. And it was a headline-grabbing opportunity for CryptoKitties, the world's first blockchain gaming hit. But the sky-high cost of the transaction obscured a more difficult truth: CryptoKitties was dying, and it had been for some time. • Dragon was never resold—a strange fate for one of the most historically relevant NFTs ever. Newer NFTs such as “The Merge,” a piece of digital art that sold for the equivalent of $92 million, left Dragon behind as the NFT market surged to record sales, totaling roughly $18 billion in 2021. Has the world simply moved on to newer blockchain projects? Or is this the fate that awaits all NFTs?