CryptoKitties has announced a migration from Ethereum to the new Flow blockchain.
Flow was developed last year by Dapper Labs, the company that created CryptoKitties, and aims specifically to be “a fast, secure, and developer-friendly blockchain built to support the next generation of games, apps, and the digital assets that will power them”.
It all originated from the well-known scalability problem and the fact that the other existing solutions were not considered suitable for the applications that Dapper Labs wants to create.
The decentralized alternatives were based on sharding or sidechains, but the Dapper Labs team felt that these solutions would make the interaction between smart contracts too complex and prone to errors.
That’s why they designed a new blockchain, different from the classic ones, with a pipeline architecture that separates processes, typically performed by a single node, into five different types of nodes, significantly reducing effort and improving efficiency.
For Flow, the Dapper Labs team has also developed a new consensus algorithm, called Specialized Proof of Confidential Knowledge (SPoCK).
Existing tools, such as the Dapper Wallet, will support both Ethereum and Flow, allowing users to access assets and dApps on both networks, so CryptoKitties will continue to live on Ethereum.
Especially since with nearly 100,000 Kitty owners, CryptoKitties remains the largest non-financial dApp on the Ethereum blockchain, with over 2 million transactions processed on-chain in 2019.
The migration of CryptoKitties to Flow will take place in several stages, maintaining all current features, with a series of changes specifically aimed at bringing CryptoKitties into the mainstream.
The first phase will consist of the distribution of an updated version of the smart contract on Flow, in order to make it available to community developers.
The new smart contract will be retro-compatible to allow users to migrate their Kitties to Flow and to make them breedable both with Kitties born on Flow and those born on Ethereum.
Kitties born on Flow will have a new look, with a much more flexible style that will allow Kitties to be adapted to virtual worlds and a wider metaverse that will be created on Flow.
Although it will not be compulsory, if the migration takes place on a large scale, thanks in particular to the incentives provided for those who decide to migrate, this could be very positive for the congestion problems on the Ethereum network.
Indeed, in the past CryptoKitties had already slowed down the network at certain points and, should it achieve even greater success, it would risk causing even more problems for Ethereum.
On the other hand, it is very common for a crypto project to be born on Ethereum and then evolve with its own blockchain, as happened for example with Binance.
The Ethereum network is now a widely spread and used platform, which allows to create and distribute dApps in a much easier and faster way compared to a brand-new blockchain created from zero.
However, when a project born on Ethereum is successful in terms of users and use, it is often forced to migrate to solutions designed ad hoc in order to scale.
