A $170,000 Cat and a $2.3 Million Field: The Record Sales of Blockchain Gaming

Every boom has its trophy sales, the prices people point to years later to explain how strange things got. In blockchain gaming, those trophies are digital: a cat, a car, a creature and a few squares of land. Each sale below set a record when it happened. Together they map the rise and fall of the whole idea that game items could be valuable investments.

2018: the $170,000 cat

In September 2018, a CryptoKitty called Dragon sold for 600 ETH, about $170,000 at the time. It beat the previous most expensive cat by roughly $60,000, and it remains the most famous price in the history of the game that started it all (read the Dapper Labs story).

The seller made money. For the buyer, the value now rests on how much a piece of crypto history is worth, because the wider CryptoKitties market collapsed soon after.

2019: the race car that beat everything

In May 2019, Animoca Brands held the first official Formula 1 NFT auction for its game F1 Delta Time. A car called 1-1-1 sold for 415.9 ETH, worth more than $100,000 at the time, and it became the most expensive NFT of 2019.

The buyer was later revealed as the collector known as Metakovan, who in March 2021 would make headlines around the world by paying $69 million for a digital artwork by Beeple. F1 Delta Time itself did not last: Animoca shut the game down in March 2022 after sales had flat-lined for two years, planning to replace its NFTs with tokens for a new racing game.

2020-2021: the Axie records

Axie Infinity produced a string of records as it boomed:

• In November 2020, a rare Axie sold for 300 ETH, capping what Cointelegraph called a wild week for the game.
• In February 2021, a block of Axie virtual land sold for about $1.5 million in ether, smashing the record for a virtual property at the time.
• In November 2021, a single Genesis land plot sold for 550 ETH, about $2.3 million, the highest price for one plot of Axie land.

Each record was bigger than the last, which is exactly what you would expect at the top of a bubble (the founders' side of the story).

2022: land in a game that did not exist

The final record of the boom came from Yuga Labs. A month after its $317 million Otherdeed sale, a single Otherside deed resold for $1.5 million in May 2022, for land in a game that, as of late 2026, has still not fully launched (the Otherside story).

In The Sandbox, a $4.3 million land deal involving Atari and Republic Realm in late 2021 was reported as the largest virtual land sale to date.

Who made money, and why it matters

The pattern is consistent. The people who reliably made money from these sales were:

• the studios, which took the first sale or a fee on every trade;
• the sellers, who cashed out at the top;
• early holders, who bought before the hype and sold during it.

Many record buyers, as far as public market prices show, hold items worth far less than they paid. That is not a moral judgment: collectors buy art and memorabilia knowing the price can fall. But it is a reminder that a record sale tells you about demand on one day, not about lasting value.

Record prices were the marketing of the blockchain-gaming boom. Each one was a headline that drew in new players hoping to own the next Dragon or the next Genesis plot. The fall that followed is why most game studios today talk about "digital ownership" rather than investment, and why, if you hear about a record sale now, it is worth asking who is selling.

Token prices are highly volatile. Nothing in this article is investment advice.