The CryptoKitties fans can now sign up their kitties for races where they can win prizes in ethers. The new game is called KittyRace and it combines the abilities of the CryptoKitties and luck in a version of decentralized poker game.
In KittyRace, the developers used the smart contracts technology of the Ethereum blockchain network to create races every ten minutes. Each race consists of three laps with electronic music playing in the background. Two to ten kitties can participate in each race and the registration fee is 0.005 ethers. The prize consists of the registration fees minus the rewards for the miners. The actual prize amount depends on the number of participants in the specific race.
In each race points are awarded to each CryptoKitty competing and the one with the highest number of points wins the race. The distribution of points is the following: up to 19 points are assigned in a fair and random way; up to 12 points are assigned for genetic makeup of the CryptoKitties, which means the dominating genes will get more points; finally, two points are distributed between the first and the second player to join the race. Any user can watch the race online from his or her web browser, without participating in the race.
The developer of KittyRace is a company called Endless Names. This is not the company that developed CryptoKitties (Axiom Zen). This is possible because CryptoKitties is a decentralized app (Dapp), which means usage rights do not have to be purchased in order to create a new application based on the already existing one.
For the time being, Charley Hine and Eugene Otto, the creators of KittyRace, do not earn any money from it, because they consider it to be an experiment and they are waiting for the rules of the decentralized betting games to become more clear, to be able to make money out of their racing game.
According to the KittyRace Telegram group, the owners of the CryptoKitties recognized the potential of the new application and have started growing and selling kitties specifically for participating in the races. This game could become viral if we compare it to the success of CryptoKitties in December last year. Last December, CryptoKitties occupies around 15% of all the transactions in the Ethereum blockchain network. Currently, that number has doubled and the game managed to raise 12 million dollars after the first financing round.
It seems the developers in the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem are focused on video games. Out of 250 new decentralized apps created in the last two months, more than 180 (more than 70%) were video games.
