CryptoKitties, a game that allows players to buy, collect and sell virtual cats, is moving to a new blockchain two years after crashing the Ethereum network.
The surge in the number of people who started breeding virtual cats when CryptoKitties launched in 2017 congested the Ethereum network, so CryptoKitties creator Dapper Labs developed the blockchain Flow to address scalability issues.
“Flow rethinks many other design choices to improve usability for developers and consumers alike, including upgradable smart contracts, human-readable security, and more.”
On Thursday, Dapper Labs revealed that the digital collectibles game is finally migrating to Flow.
The move will enable new features, such as animations and third-dimensional capabilities. Dapper Labs CEO Roham Gharegozlou says the move will also address other issues such as the increasingly prohibitive cost of breeding virtual cats on Ethereum.
Despite the migration, Gharegozlou says he hopes CryptoKitties will continue on Ethereum.
Flow provides developers with a platform to build applications for non-fungible tokens (NTFs) which are tokenized assets that can be used to interact with other virtual worlds, including those that are being developed on Flow.
“We want to make sure that not just CryptoKitties, but any other NFT has a chance to be able to access a high throughput environment, have people build applications for them, and have high throughput marketplaces that can scale to billions of users.”