The game became very popular in late 2017, attracting the most network activity on the Ethereum platform. The “digital decentralized artwork” Celestial Cyber Dimension was sold for $140,000 at the Christie’s auction initiated by art/blockchain startup Codex and Rare Art Labs at a conference in May 2018. The most expensive CryptoKitty to date, it was designed by Guile Gaspar (now Guile Twardowski) and was housed in a specially produced “hardware wallet,” or offline storage device, designed by Richard Moore.

The artwork reflects an interest in blockchain by art market players as a way to innovate sales and artwork collecting infrastructure. A number of startups like Codex are developing systems for provenance tracked on a blockchain’s immutable ledger, collective share-based “fractal” ownership, and artwork-backed financial trading. Established art auction houses like Christie’s are interested in the potential of these innovations and in access to the recently acquired wealth of early adopters of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

The technical developments on Ethereum’s blockchain that enable CryptoKitties have inspired other experimental projects in an art context. Artists have been seeking the possibility to make digital files unique and tradable in a similar way to offline objects for decades. CryptoKitties is a promising example of this phenomenon – one that may pave the way for different ways of financializing digital artwork and may no longer need the existing art sales infrastructure models. However, gaps in the design of such systems still have many questioning the technical and ideological compatibility of blockchain systems with art infrastructure.