CryptoKitties raises $ 15 million: new viral games are planned

Older generations play with real pets. The current crowd on the iPhone uses cryptos to breed pets that pretend to have special "attributes".

Dapper Labs on Friday announced a new $ 15 million fundraiser from a powerful investor, demonstrating the optimism of major technologies vis-à-vis interactive games operating under blockchain. The company founded by Canada is behind CryptoKitties, an Ethereum-based distributed application (dApp), considered to be the most successful dApp game of all time. Users spend ETH tokens to raise in perpetuity (if they wish) uniquely identifiable kittens who "live" on the Ethereum network. Users can also sell their virtual mega furballs.

Venrock, the venture capital firm of the Rockefeller family, led the tour de table. Other investors have joined venture capital based in Silicon Valley, including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Samsung NEXT and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). (Andreesen has invested in unicorns such as Coinbase and Airbnb.)

Other donors have also joined the group and could provide strategic support and / or partnerships. Among them are William Morris Endeavor (an art agency) and aXiomatic (an electronic sports company). Dapper Labs is trying to bring similar success to Zynga at the Web 3.0 game. The Canadian company has recently unveiled a teaser website that foreshadows new App games in the future: "The team … puts more than just cats on the blockchain," the page said.

CryptoKitties becoming a pop culture sensation shows the promise of adorable dapp concepts. On YouTube, cat videos are well known for accumulating tens of millions of views – and the phenomenon has likely spawned innumerable memoirs in the country about humanity's overriding predisposition to boyfriends at four. paws.

Ironically, the craze for games has also revealed scalability flaws in peer-to-peer open source networks, which can prevent mbadive adoption if they are not corrected in time.

Published in November 2017, the CryptoKitties fan base has exploded to more than 1.5 million users in less than six months (although usage rates have dropped since). Last December, as investors and speculators wanted to acquire crypto-currencies in a spectacular bubble, the game almost exploited the Ethereum network. CryptoKitties has congested 11% of traffic and up to 25% during peak hours.

In February, Michael Wuehler of blockchain infrastructure company Infura told ConsenSys:

All reading activities in the blockchain have exploded our daily demands from 2 billion / day to more than 4 billion / day … overnight! … [All] As a result, the cost of buying the kitten cost more than the badet itself …. It threatened to kill CryptoKitties entirely, because when the charges are so low, the game is over.

"The path to mainstream adoption is guided by fascinating and innovative experiences, not by financial speculation" said Roham Gharegozlou, founder of Dapper Labs, in the November 2 blog. "Last year, 2.3 billion gamers spent $ 80 billion in virtual items that they do not own. We have already demonstrated how blockchain technology gives gamers the ability to control the value they've paid. "

In a statement on November 2, Dapper Labs said it would use these funds to expand in the US and around the world and further develop the technology infrastructure. The expansion will be led by former executives from Disney and Unity (the world's largest gaming development platform). The company also hired employees from Ubisoft, EA Sports, Amazon, ESPN, Hasbro and Zynga, who have recently joined the group.

Buy me, meow.

The author is the holder of the ETH mentioned in this article.