Cryptomarkets Gamified: What Can We Learn by Playing CryptoKitties?

Serada's 2020 DiGRA paper examines whether CryptoKitties, a blockchain-based collectible game, can serve as an effective educational tool for blockchain adoption. Drawing on a year of autoethnographic play, the author compares the developers' stated goals with what the game actually delivers. The central finding is that the game's core blockchain features, including decentralization, uniqueness, scarcity, and peer-to-peer trading, are largely present in its design, yet the game does little to make cryptocurrency services more accessible to newcomers. Its onboarding skips essential steps such as wallet setup and acquiring Ether, and the study concludes that whatever educational value the game offers arises mainly from players' independent exploration of crypto markets rather than from the game itself.

The analysis highlights several structural barriers and trade-offs. The Dapper wallet's phone-number requirement, the company's gas-fee subsidies and its shift toward centralization, and uneven geographic access to Ether purchases all complicate participation. Dapper's daily active users reportedly fell by about half after launch and remained near that lower level into April 2020. The author characterizes CryptoKitties less as a teaching instrument than as a "gamification of a market," one that mainly engages players already familiar with cryptocurrency. Documented total investments exceeding €300 underscore the significant pay-to-play costs involved, and token oversupply, with over 1.6 million kitties against only a few thousand active players as of November 2019, undermined the scarcity on which the design depended.

The study's concluding section emphasizes that the most meaningful lessons arise outside the game, through real-world trading, peer-to-peer exchanges, and informal arrangements that carry no legal protection. Learning losses were real, and the author's play only approached break-even after months of daily engagement. The paper ultimately judges CryptoKitties a limited educational tool but a successful example of market gamification, and suggests that "crypto games" may be better suited to business simulations of unregulated markets than to introducing blockchain fundamentals.