MoonCats

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MoonCats
Developer(s)	ponderware
Director(s)
Producer(s)
Designer(s)
Programmer(s)
Artist(s)
Writer(s)
Composer(s)
Release	2017
Genre(s)	Collectable
Cabinet
Arcade system
CPU
Sound
Display

Search MoonCats on Amazon.

MoonCats were released on August 10, 2017 as the first on-chain generative non-fungible tokens (NFT) on the Ethereum blockchain.. It was developed by ponderware, an anonymous group of developers working on decentralized applications. They described the project as “an exploration of user-discoverable blockchain collectibles”. There are 25,440 MoonCats in total, and there can not be more created.

History

The Rescue Mission

Visitors to the MoonCatRescue website could “scan” for cats on the surface of the moon. The process on the technical side was very similar to how Ether is mined; the timing depended on the power of the visitor’s computer and some luck. It took anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to find a MoonCat.

After a MoonCat was found, the visitor could decide whether to rescue it or scan for another one. Rescuing a MoonCat submitted a transaction to mint a new token using the smart contract that developers of the project deployed on the Ethereum blockchain.

The Genesis Cats

On top of the 25,344 MoonCats that people could rescue, the developers created 256 unique Genesis MoonCats which visitors could adopt in the Adoption Center, a built-in marketplace of the website. Their intention was to collect Ether from the sale of the genesis cats, however a change they made during their QA process led to those funds being locked away forever.

The Genesis MoonCats were added in batches of 16 cats when the contract owner called the AddGenesisCatGroup function. Once added, a Genesis MoonCat could be rescued by paying an adoption fee. The fee was defined in the contract by a price curve starting at 0.3 ETH for the first batch and increasing by 0.3 ETH for every subsequent batch. In 2017, 6 batches of Genesis MoonCats were added. Of the 96 cats added, 17 were adopted and rescued in that first year. The remaining 79 Genesis MoonCats were rescued in the rediscovery of 2021.

The Rediscovery

During the first year of the project, only 3,365 cats were rescued out of the maximum 25,344 possible. Interest declined in the following years to the point where only 3 cats were claimed in 2020. On March 12, 2021, a Twitter user rediscovered the project and tweeted about it which caused all the remaining cats to be rescued within 4 hours. At this point the rescue mission was complete

The Community Vote

At the time of the rediscovery, only 96 of the 256 Genesis Cats had been offered up for adoption. Once all the MoonCats got rescued, ponderware decided to let the community vote whether the remaining 160 Genesis Cats should be released. The community decided to delete the private keys necessary for releasing them. As a result of this, the total number of Genesis Cats will remain at 96, and the total circulating supply of MoonCats is 25,440 instead of the originally planned 25,600.

The Acclimator

After the rediscovery, the original developers of the project returned and started to work on new features.

The original MoonCats smart contract was relying on the ERC-20 token standard (but only partially compliant to it). In 2018 - inspired by another early NFT project, the CryptoPunks - a new standard called ERC-721 was released, which was specifically designed for NFTs. Tokens adhering to this standard can be traded on public marketplaces, like OpenSea.

Ponderware decided to create an official “wrapper” for MoonCats; another smart contract, which wraps the original tokens in a new one, using the above mentioned ERC-721 standard. They named this new contract “The Acclimator” and the process of wrapping MoonCats “acclimation” (fitting it into the lore of the MoonCats as after being rescued from the moon, they needed some extra help to adjust to Earth's environment). This opens up a lot of possibilities for additional features for MoonCats, which are expected to be launched in the future.

Types and attributes

Cats were rescued by "scanning the moon's surface". What the user's browser did during this process is randomly generate numbers, searching for one that met the algorithm's requirements to be a "seed code". Once a valid seed was found, the RescueCat function on the smart contract could be called and a Cat ID was created.

Each ID is a hexadecimal number that starts with "0x". The attributes of the MoonCat are embedded in it's ID (0xAAkkRRGGBB):

• The first two digits (idx 0:1) determine whether a cat is a Rescue (value = 00) or a Genesis (value = ff)
• The next two digits (idx 2:3) after are the “k value”. Converting the 2 digit k value into an 8-digit 0-padded binary determines the cat’s pattern and pose.
  • The first digit of the binary value is an indicator for Pale-ness
  • The second digit of the binary value tells direction. 0 is left-facing, 1 is right-facing
  • The third and fourth digit combined determines the face.
    • 00 = Smiling
    • 01 = Pouting
    • 10 = Grumpy
    • 11 = Shy
  • The fifth and sixth digit combined determines fur pattern.
    • 00 = Solid
    • 01 = Tabby
    • 10 = Spotted
    • 11 = Tortie
  • The last two digits combined determine pose
    • 00 = Standing
    • 01 = Sleeping
    • 10 = Pouncing
    • 11 = Stalking
• The last 6 digits are RGB values that are fed into the mooncat parser to determine the cat’s color. These are not the final RGB values of the cat.

Marketplaces

• Adoption Center - MoonCat Adoption Center
• Official MoonCats - Acclimated on OpenSea - Official MoonCats - Acclimated Marketplace on OpenSea: Buy, sell, and explore digital assets
• Genesis MoonCats GMC24 Pool on Niftex - [1]
• Wrapped MoonCatsRescue - Unofficial on OpenSea - Wrapped MoonCatsRescue - Unofficial Marketplace on OpenSea: Buy, sell, and explore digital assets
• Acclimated MoonCats Pool on NFT20 - NFT20
• Wrapped MoonCats Pool on NFT20 - NFT20
• MoonCats Rescue Pool on NFTX - [2]
• uMOON Pool on Unicly - Unicly

External links

• Official website

This article "MoonCats" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:MoonCats. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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