This is a guide on how to buy WCK, called Wrapped CryptoKitties but also how to mint WCK tokens on your own whether you have any CryptoKitties already or not.
Firstly, it helps to understand what WCK is. It is not like many other tokens you might be aware of. It is not the official CryptoKitties token (there is no fungible token or native token or governance token for CryptoKitties). CryptoKitties is an NFT gaming and collectible platform, so all assets are NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens).
Wrapped CryptoKitties or WCK is created by sending any CryptoKitties NFT into the wrapping smart contract. In return, the sender gets 1 WCK. You can also burn your WCK for any underlying NFT from the wrapping smart contract. Thus it was originally created as a way to create a liquid pool of CryptoKitties that you can send a cat to and get a cat out of.
Therefore, the amount of WCK is not limited, i.e. you can mint more WCK as the price rises. However, it is not uncontrolled inflation either – ultimately, every WCK in existence is backed by a cat from the CryptoKitties contract. Know these details before you decide to buy WCK.
If you want to see all the cats backing WCK, you can see them here. If you like any cat there, you can also spend 1 WCK to acquire it.
How to Buy WCK
If you just want to buy WCK from the market, your best bet is Uniswap. The community has decided Uniswap is the best place to pool liquidity. It is also important to remember that WCK tends not to have the highest liquidity, so the pool can be shallow. Make sure to check for price slippage before you buy WCK from Uniswap directly.
Due to the low liquidity, the price can at times be quite volatile. Remember that you can mint more WCK, so people will use that method when the price spikes a lot. Therefore, make sure to check the floor prices of CryptoKitties (lowest on market) before you decide to go buy WCK to hold for the longer term.
If you are trying to buy WCK from a non-ETH token, then make sure to check the prices on 1inch first before converting your token to ETH and then head over to Uniswap for WCK. This way you’ll get the best price execution across the decentralized exchange ecosystem.
How to Mint WCK
As described above, you can also mint WCK if you hold any CryptoKitties. If you don’t, you can simply buy the cheapest one from the CryptoKitties marketplace and wrap it to get 1 WCK.
The simplest way to mint WCK is via KittyHelper. First, connect your MetaMask or other Web3 wallet to the site. Then, go to ‘Kitties’ section which will list all the CryptoKitties in your ETH wallet. You will see a checkbox on top called “Add to WCK queue”. It is a queue because you can wrap up to 30 cats in one single transaction.
Once you’ve added all the cats to the queue, go to the WCK converter tab. Due to the way the CryptoKitties contract is written, you’ll need to approve every cat individually and then one final transaction to wrap them all up (there is way to “approve all” in one go). So for example if you are wrapping 10 cats, you’ll need to do 11 transactions in total. Make sure you take the gas prices into consideration.