CryptoKitties, the blockchain pet pioneer that Baidu and NetEase once imitated, is about to enter the Chinese market with a mobile game version

CryptoKitties, the Ethereum cat-raising game that became popular across the blockchain network at the end of 2017, announced that it would enter China!

Leifeng.com reported on February 9 that according to foreign media Quartz, the mobile version of CryptoKitties will be first launched on the Apple App Store in China and Singapore during the Spring Festival. Earlier this month, it had signed an exclusive cooperation agreement with Animoca Brands Corporation Ltd., a mobile game developer in Hong Kong, China. The release of versions in other countries and regions will be postponed for several weeks. Both times are still undetermined.

CryptoKitties is a cat breeding game based on Ethereum. It was officially released on November 28 last year. It immediately spread like a virus and accidentally caused long-term and large-scale congestion on the Ethereum network.

Before this, it was referred to as CryptoKitties or Ethereum Cats in China. The upcoming CryptoKitties mobile game has an official Chinese name - "迷恋猫", which not only expresses the players' irresistible desire to pet cats, but also is the homonym of "密链". "密链" means "(encrypted) blockchain".

From the blockchain community to the wider user group, the world has shown interest in CryptoKitties. Quartz said that the game now has more than 250,000 active players. According to the third-party website CryptoKitties Sales, as of February 9, more than 280,000 kittens have been sold, with a transaction volume of more than 19 million US dollars, and the average transaction price is about 69 US dollars. The highest price of a kitten is 253.3 ETH, which is currently equivalent to 209,000 US dollars.

As an important driving force for the development of global blockchain, China is naturally a market that cannot be ignored. Regardless of the purpose, many Chinese players are eager to try, but policy factors have built a high wall, hindering CryptoKitties' pace in conquering the Chinese market.

Previously, CryptoKitties was (and still is) only available on PCs with Chrome or Firefox browsers installed, and players had to install a digital wallet plug-in called MetaMask and have some Ethereum.

However, downloading the extension requires access to the Chrome web store, which is blocked by the Chinese firewall, and a large number of Chinese players are blocked. Therefore, the developer Axiom Zen decided to make a mobile version specifically to meet the needs of the Chinese market. This determination can also be seen from the activities during the Spring Festival. According to Leifeng.com, in order to celebrate the Spring Festival, all new cats born during the festival will have Chinese elements, mainly three special crypto cats, including a kitten wearing a lion dance costume and a cat that looks like a golden dragon.

Axiom Zen promotes mobile games by cooperating with local game companies. Earlier this month, they signed a distribution cooperation agreement with Hong Kong mobile game company Animoca Brands. Animoca Brands focuses on making iOS and Google Play mobile games with big IPs such as TV or comics, such as Doraemon, Garfield, Ultraman and Astro Boy. In January 2015, Animoca Brands also went public on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) through a backdoor listing. According to Leifeng.com, Chinese A-share listed game company Palm Fun Technology is one of its shareholders.

It can be seen that the CryptoKitties developers are trying to avoid policy risks. Co-founder Benny Giang said, "We want to ensure that we avoid any potential regulatory risks."

But another layer of policy risk may be more serious. Players must initially have some Ethereum to buy their first kitten, and China currently still prohibits the exchange of legal currency and virtual currency.

In response, Benny Giang explained that while FancyCat includes digital wallet functionality, it will not educate users on how to convert fiat currency into Ethereum because China has cracked down on cryptocurrency trading and closed all exchanges, and according to some reports, is also planning to block offshore trading platforms.

But obviously, the answer given by CryptoKitties is not very convincing.

However, Animoca Brands has brought another piece of news - Crush Cats may not be released in mainland China. According to Quartz, CEO Robby Yung said that "Crush Cats will be launched on the Apple App Store in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore in the future", and did not mention the mainland.

On the other hand, after CryptoKitties became popular, a zoo was opened on the blockchain. In just one month, there were Region chain rabbits, Ifish, and Wanke monkeys. Recently, large companies have also entered the market. NetEase released a blockchain pet Lucky Cat (although it announced the end of internal testing within a few days), and Baidu also recently launched a blockchain pet Letz Dog. Within a few hours of Letz Dog’s release, the network had already shown abnormalities, which is enough to show the enthusiasm of Chinese users.

Baidu Let's Dog

It is worth pointing out that as virtual currency and blockchain spread in social media, more and more people have witnessed the expansion of the bubble. Although we cannot accurately estimate the number of speculators, we can infer from the recent surge in the number of registered users on major trading platforms that the number must be considerable.

For this group, cats, dogs, or monkeys are not important, blockchain applications are not important, the original vision of CryptoKitties is not worth caring about, and the game economy is not important. Only profit matters.

The bubble that slowly expands will eventually burst. There are many examples of this, such as the Beanie Babies incident in Europe and the United States in late 1996.

Algorithm engineer Cai Zhiwei recently wrote that by cracking the genetic laws of CryptoKitties, he earned a total of about 120,000 yuan worth of Ethereum in two weeks, but subsequent transactions did not continue.

"Later, the market shrank too quickly, and there were no new people coming in to buy cats, so I stopped selling cats," the article concludes.