The CAT Cambrian Explosion – Attack of the Tokens

A few months ago in a set of predictions he has been eerily accurate about, Freddie from Chia Explorer predicted there would be a “CAT Cambrian explosion”, referring to the explosion of diversity of life on Earth about 541 million years ago. He was oh so right but still could not have predicted this.

When I submitted my first CATs to Taildatabase there were maybe 8 tokens listed there I think? Mostly the default ones from Chia and a few others that had popped up. Now if you check there are 83 and more are popping up every day. This is an incredible amount of growth, far outstripping the explosions of Chia forks we saw last year. This is because of how easy it is to mint a new CAT, taking basically no resources and no time.

There are some advantages to this. Space Marmots has used the ease of creating CATs as a very smoothly functioning payment rail to pre-sell their NFTs. (Disclosure: I am a technical consultant for the Space Marmots project). Other serious projects are doing that as well, and will continue to I am sure. But there are also people just making random CATs and trying to sell them when they have really no value or plan. You can see Freddie’s 1mojo.trade portfolio at his site here, and you can tell that a lot of that is basically garbage.

This is not sustainable, and most of them will be dead and gone in a few months. I do hope Chia Network gives us the ability to filter them out of the wallet when we don’t care about them because there are some people who probably have more than 50 different tokens polluting their wallets at this point. The thing I care the most about is that in the confusion some people are going to lose valuable coins or tokens trading for some without value. There has already been an attempt to scam people with a token called XCH, which wasn’t particularly successful but still concerning. Like anything new that smells sweet, the roaches will swarm to it so be careful.