MoonCats has seen a re-discovery of sorts. The long-dormant NFT collectibles platform saw new life breathed into it after the NFT craze of this year finally spread out to it. Now, however, the MoonCats community has a new set of problems on their hands: Trading Bots
Bots Overtaking Users At MoonCats
MoonCats’ entire selling point is their 8-bit cat NFTs that all live on the moon. These cats can be “adopted” or traded by the users, with the entire project itself being launched on the 9th of August, 2017. This goes to show that Pondorware, the developer of MoonCats, was about 4 years too early to really catch on to the NFT craze. Ponderware set a hard limit of the number of MoonCats to be created, setting it at $25,500 in total. These MoonCats are generated in a process quite like Ethereum mining, as well.
However, it’s clear that something is amiss with MoonCats’ sudden rise in popularity. The community of the platform is very much afraid when it comes to the upcoming release of the 160 Genesis cats.
These Genesis cats, the final release of its kind, might very well be hijacked by a legion of trading bots. For a while now, users have complained about trading bots that have overrun the platform, with the express goal of these bots to accumulate these new cats as soon as purchasing them is available.
The 2021 NFT Boom
The re-discovery of MoonCats is primarily thanks to the great NFT boom that’s been happening in recent months. The entire NFT industry saw a massive surge, which bled over into MoonCats proper. MoonCats NFTs were going from anything between $50 to $200, but have subsequently seen a large and rapid rise in value. As it stands now, the average going rate for a MoonCats NFT stands at an even 1 ETH.
Now, of all the MoonCats NFTs out there, the so-called “Genesis MoonCats” is the most sought-after of its kind. These MoonCats were the first 256 MoonCats mined on the platform at large, one was sold for a whopping 100 ETH earlier this month, worth around $180,000.
A Vote For The Community
The final 160 Genesis Cats are currently waiting for release. However, the community at large is fearful that all of these Genesis cats can be bought up by bots. Ponderware, instead of ignoring them outright as they could have, decided to look towards its community to a possible solution, with their first proposal being a scorched earth solution.
On the 17th of March, 2020, Ponderware set up a smart contract poll. This poll allows for MoonCats users to give their views on the question of whether or not the developers of MoonCatRescue should destroy the private keys they hold. This would result that no more Genesis MoonCats could ever be released to the public, effectively burning 160 tokens from a 256 token batch.
Should a “yes” vote occur, no more Genesis MoonCats will be released and those private keys for those wallets would be destroyed. Should “no” be the dominant outcome, things will be trickier, as a “fair” method must be devised in regard to the distribution, which the developer warned might very well be impossible
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