Cryptokitties Craze & Story of Ethereum L2

Last week, we talked about blockchain basics, how it is a new financial ledger, and how Web3 is a new era of the internet that uses blockchain technology. As we advance, we will go through the first popular dApp: Cryptokitties and its craziest craze of 2017. Let’s dive in!!

Bitcoin to Ethereum

Ethereum ♦ was the next successful blockchain after Bitcoin ₿. Bitcoin was introduced as digital money. Ethereum advanced on the idea of Bitcoin and was a revolution with smart contracts included, which took the game to the next level. Now more than transactions, voting, and building decentralized applications or “dApps“ have become possible.

Ethereum features

• Consensus mechanism - Proof of Stake (POS) - Ethereum shifted from POW mining to POS in Sept 2022

• Smart Contracts - making dApps

• Ethereum blockchain has ether (ETH) cryptocurrency

What is a dApp?

dApp (decentralized applications) are like normal applications, unlike the web2 internet that we use today, it is built on a blockchain network. The nodes power the EVM (Ethereum virtual machine) on top of which dApps are built using smart contracts.

Cryptokitties 😺

Cryptokitties is a very popular dApp built on the Ethereum blockchain. It is a virtual cat breeding & collecting game, in which based on “cattributes“, new genes are generated on breeding, generating a cat with unique traits - this was the most popular use of NFTs back in a decade. These NFTs can be bought/sold.

Breeding cats gave birth to new mewtations - NFTs. NFTs are Non Fungible Tokens - each cat is one of a kind, and could not be replicated. So it represents a unique digital asset and ownership.

So buy/sell/trading of these crypto kitties was performed using the Ethereum blockchain network on which money transactions took place as well. However, the rising popularity of crypto kitties overwhelmed the network with its engagement, and many transactions got pending due to this single dApp. This gave rise to the major drawback of this blockchain - SCALABILITY.

Birth of Ethereum L2

Thus the need to make this network scalable to handle large amounts of traffic - ETHEREUM LAYER 2 emerged as a pharaoh. It aimed to branch out transactions from the main blockchain to increase the transaction throughput. Eg. Aave, Celo, etc So the main network can focus on the bigger transactions while they handle the extra traffic, which also reduces the gas price the person has to pay for their transaction and enhances the speed of the transaction.

Wrapping Up!

An obstacle in the path is not a stopping point, but to emerge more strongly. Many enhancements have been made since 2017, even many blockchain networks emerged advancing the idea of Bitcoin and Ethereum, overcoming their drawbacks, and adding new features.

So you can kinda say Bitcoin and Ethereum are ancestors of all the blockchains.

Last Note

If you made it here, congratulations!! Have a nice day, stay healthy, and stay curious.

Thanks to #SheFi for their amazing sessions and for spreading the word about web3 and blockchain and getting me so excited about what new technologies could bring.

Until next time!