Mythicats — NFTs First Interoperability Success Story

Adam McBride
2 min readSep 15, 2021

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Screen capture of Mythicats on Opensea

With all of the hype surrounding the Loot Project for the past couple of weeks and it's encouraging the interoperability of its NFTs with other projects, I thought this would be a great time to pay homage to the first NFT to successfully uses interoperability — Mythicats.

Mythicats were the brainchild of the team that build the early Ethereum blockchain game Mythereum which was launched on February 5, 2018.

Mythereum is an NFT trading card game where players battle each other using cards of varying strengths and powers.

The Mythicats were added to the game and enabled owners of a CryptoKitties to take that CryptoKitty and forge it into a completely new NFT — a Mythicat.

Mythereum was the first project to deliver on the promise of NFT interoperability and for that reason alone it is historically significant.

Interoperable NFTs

This idea of interoperability, or using NFTs across games and projects, has been around since the early days of Bitcoin-based games.

There were games on Bitcoin that pulled characters from other games and created unique characters within those games. But to my understanding, they weren’t using the actual NFTs to make new NFTs. The developers were just borrowing the character’s name and attributes to create a new character.

What the Mythereum team did was revolutionary because you could take an existing CryptoKitty NFT and forge it into a completely new NFT to use in Mythereum gameplay. The CryptoKitties rarities were used to determine the strengths of the newly formed Mythicat NFT. And if you didn’t want to play Mythereum anymore you could simply un-forge your Mythicat and your CryptoKitty would return to you, no worse for the journey.

To think that Loot was the first time many of you had even considered the use cases for NFT interoperability shows you just how early the Mythereum team was.

Rarity and the Lost Wallet

When you search for Mythicats on Opensea you will see that the total supply is 547 cats.

There is just one problem.

That number does not take into account a widely known fact in the Mythereum community, that a fellow community member lost the keys to their wallet with at least 200 Mythicats.

So that only leaves about 350 of the first interoperable NFTs in the world.

Mythicats.

Full transparency: I purchased a handful of Mythicats when I learned of them through a friend on Discord who pointed me to @LogicalBTC excellent Mythereum Twitter thread.

Opensea: https://opensea.io/collection/mythereum

Website: https://www.mythereum.io/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/mythereum

Discord: https://discord.gg/Fn8qhE34Xt

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Adam McBride

Passionate about humans, freedom, and how crypto empowers both.