Until March 11th 2021 not even all 625 CryptoCats were claimed, but a sudden rediscovery by CryptoPunks collectors reignited the NFT project big time. CryptoCats launched in 2017, and up until earlier today anybody could claim a digital cat for 0.8 ETH. Within 24 hours since its rediscovery there’s more than $1 million in trading volume.
CryptoPunks have been selling for millions of dollars. Now suddenly collectors rediscovered CryptoCats. These digital cats are inspired by the punks and launched in 2017.
Upon this rediscovery, collectors are literally throwing money at their screen, spending more than $1 million within a few hours. All cats have been claimed, and the hype is still spreading at the time of writing.
Where do these cats come from?
CryptoCats is a digital collectible that launched in 2017 inspired by Larva Labs’ CryptoPunks. Ownership over these digital cars is stored on the Ethereum blockchain.
These Crypto Cats could be acquired freely, simply by paying a small fee. That fee was 0.8 ETH, a rather small amount of money at that time. Each CryptoCat is tied to a CryptoCat token on the blockchain, recognized on the blockchain as a CCAT token.
In total there are 625 CCAT tokens on the market, and therefore there are just as many digital cats. According to the blockchain there are 54 token holders. The top 10 holders have 21.6% (135 cats) of the total supply.
Images were too big to store on the blockchain when the project launched 3.5 years ago. Therefore they used the SHA256 hash of the composite image of all the cats. That hash is stored within the contract.
Technically it’s not entirely similar to CryptoPunks. Nonetheless it’s one of the earliest NFT collections on the market. Its early, pre-ERC721 launch, fair distribution and ability to name the cats, makes CryptoCats quite unique.
How valuable are CryptoCats?
Until March 11th 2021 some of the CryptoCats were still not claimed. However, the project got rediscovered by some NFT collectors. It’s probably the first CryptoPunks clone, and there are only 625 cats in existence. That’s far less than the 10 thousand punks that were minted.
Originally users could claim these cats by paying a few dollars minting fee. However, right now the minting fee is 0.8 ETH, which equals approximately $1650. When the project was discovered, there were still a couple of hundred cats available, but that changed within two hours.
Just a few hours ago in punk chat, someone noticed that there were still ~200 unclaimed cats available on https://t.co/EEiKE3wikV (@CryptoCats26), costing 0.8 ETH each to claim.
The project reached Main Net launch weeks before CryptoKitties — and the floor is now nearing 25 ETH. pic.twitter.com/G4E9Z5J924
— RC ?? (@ResellCalendar) March 12, 2021
CryptoCats aren’t CryptoPunks, but they seem to be the next best thing.
