For players who like to play mobile chain games, Axie Infinit is very familiar with the game. Today, I will share with you some relevant stories about its founder.
Trung Nguyen is intrigued by CryptoKitties because it combines something he loves — games — with something he used to hate — blockchain. At the end of 2017, the initial coin offering (ICO) craze was in full swing. In his view, the main purpose of most ICOs is just to raise money, and all projects are boring, just fintech stuff and numbers on a screen.
As much as he hates blockchain, Nguyen can't help but be curious about the idea of applying blockchain technology to interesting things. So he went through buying ETH, setting up a MetaMask wallet, and buying his first Kitty. The game itself is pretty straightforward - sort of like playing Nickelodeon's Neopets, just with the added novelty of cryptocurrency trading. Compared to other games Nguyen likes, including real-time strategy games like Red Alert and Age of Empires, and MMORBA games like Dota, Nguyen was a bit overwhelmed by CryptoKitties.
CryptoKitties are represented on Ethereum by their genetic code - a unique long number. No two kitties are exactly alike. Each feline is defined by its set of "cattributes", which have unique physical characteristics and personalities. When kitties are "bred" together, their genes combine so that their offspring get some mix of "cattributes" based on their lineage.
Axie Infinity
This fascinated Nguyen and eventually inspired him to create Axie Infinity, the groundbreaking game that popularized play-to-earn video games and made The entire blockchain game field has become the focus of this year.
Using his limited knowledge of existing kitties and their parents' genetics, Nguyen began mapping the data back to source code to understand how the breeding algorithm worked and understand the exact probability of producing specific offspring with desirable traits.
"As an engineer, it's a very natural thing to do because we can look at things on a deeper level and we're trying to understand what's going on behind the scenes rather than just looking at the surface," Nguyen said.
Nguyen has been that way for a long time. He represented Vietnam in the 2014 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) held in Yekaterinburg, Russia - the oldest, largest and most prestigious programming competition in the world. Those who make it to the finals are Olympians in their field.
Participating in these kinds of competitions is a joy for Nguyen. A bit of an "adrenaline junkie," he revels in the thrill of going up against other smart people to push the limits of his abilities. The task of reverse engineering the CryptoKitties genome was just another technical challenge. His perspective on blockchain technology changed as he saw how the technology could be used to create many interesting and meaningful things.
Axie Infinity
Nguyen believed that blockchain adoption would be achieved through simple, elegant, decentralized applications, not boring financial software, and he came up with the idea of making his own game, similar to CryptoKitties but more Exciting. He contacted Tu Doan (better known by his pen name Masamune) and came up with the idea.
Years ago, Nguyen and Masamune were co-founders of Lozi, a VC-backed social network of food bloggers. The parallels between their backstories are uncanny. Both were deeply influenced by Japanese culture as children - they loved Pokémon and comics such as One Piece.
They also enjoy making their own games for friends from school to play. Nguyen draws characters on trading cards, while Masamune enjoys creating board games, gluing his original head on Vietnamese coins as game pieces. Masamune also likes to create creatures out of food, like using toothpicks to stick accessories into potatoes.
Axie Infinity
During Lozi's day, the two often discussed their shared passion for video games. A hardcore gamer, Nguyen researched the games he played and pulled apart game mechanics and rules, while Masamune delved into the storyline and graphics in games. That's when Masamune told Nguyen that his dream was to make his own video game someday.
For Nguyen's new idea for a blockchain game, Masamune doesn't know much about the underlying technology, but he's excited about the prospect of making games with Nguyen. Masamune sketches the first idea that comes to mind: a mix of his pet salamander (often called the Mexican Walking Fish) and the food art he used to make as a kid, which turned out to be the first-ever Axie - Puff .
In the first few months, it was just the two of them, but Masamune came up with all the original ideas and offered them to Nguyen. Nguyen uses his math skills to balance the game economy. Eventually, that's when they started to gain some traction -- about 1,000 early backers and $500,000 in committed funding.
Nguyen suggested that Masamune should leave Lozi to work full-time on Axie. Masamune was nervous about quitting his job because his financial situation was poor and he had no savings. But Masamune is confident in Nguyen's abilities and believes the risk is worth it if it means the chance to pursue his lifelong dream.
talent management
In early 2018, Jeffrey “Jiho” Zirlin browsed the Discord messaging app looking for NFT-related content to add to his resume. Before that, he had been working as a recruiter in New York, placing quantitative traders for large hedge funds such as Bridgewater and DE Shaw.
As we all know, "quantitative investment experts" are Wall Street's stock market analysis masters. They are very different from traditional investors. These people are more likely to wear jeans than suits. Decide. Zirlin's specialty is identifying those who think with both sides of the brain, who are both creative and artistic and systematically analytical.
When he joined the Axie Discord as a player, Zirlin immediately recognized Nguyen as a master of the analyst type. Zirlin later saw that he and Nguyen had bonded in the past, when Zirlin was head of growth for a (now defunct) project called KittyHats, which sold accessories built on the ERC20 token standard for players to decorate Their CryptoKitties.
CryptoKitties was one of the earliest success stories of the crypto era. The collectibles game caused a sixfold increase in the number of daily transactions on Ethereum, enough at the time to nearly crash the network and everyone followed suit.
Axie Infinity
"Just like today people ask 'what's the next Axie,' we were thinking 'what's the next CryptoKitties,'" recalls Zirlin. This is an exciting period of experimentation. KittyHats and other spin-offs like KittyRace — a game that allows CryptoKitties owners to race other pets for prize money — are helping the NFT industry thrive. Some of the people who participated in these early projects ended up achieving something now, such as OpenSea in New York, Dapper Labs in Vancouver.
Zirlin could have looked for work in the United States, but he chose to move to Vietnam. This flips the script of the typical immigrant story. Despite the high cost of living, cultural differences and language barriers, and complex visa requirements, it is often Vietnamese who leave their homeland to seek life-changing opportunities abroad.
Today, the Vietnamese diaspora is the fourth largest immigrant group in Asia, with more leaving the country each year to live in more developed countries. In 2019 alone, more than 150,000 migrant workers immigrated from Vietnam. It is a particularly popular path for young and well-educated professionals, and the brain drain is making it increasingly difficult for Vietnamese companies to fill their top jobs.
“When you convince an American and a Norwegian to drop everything and go to Vietnam, something special has to happen,” Zirlin told me wistfully, chatting with me over Zoom from his parents’ home in New York. He hasn't seen Trung since February 2020, when he spent Tet outside Vietnam, and subsequent COVID-19 meant he couldn't return to the country. But for the first two years of Sky Mavis, the company behind Axie, Zirlin shared an apartment in Ho Chi Minh City with co-founders Masamune and Aleksander Larsen.
As for Larsen, he left his girlfriend in Norway and quit a good job building "a big, exciting space game" to live and work on "a pet game" in Vietnam. He remembers how awkward it was when Nguyen came to pick him up at the airport—it was a bit weird to meet in real life, having worked entirely online before.
They chatted in the car, and Nguyen drove Larsen to his hotel. Larsen, exhausted after a long flight and looking forward to a nap, went to shower. When he emerges from the bathroom, Nguyen is sitting on a hotel bed, engrossed in his laptop, writing code. Larsen said it was like stepping into the set of a movie about startups. In this scene, they flash back to the beginning of a world-changing success story, introducing the genius programmer as he focuses on his mission. In that moment, Larsen knew he made the right decision.
Today, they have a team of 87 people around the world, with at least 60 of them in Vietnam, working on projects including the game itself, an ethereum-based sidechain called Ronin, a mobile wallet and a decentralized blockchain called Katana exchange. But early on, Nguyen did most of the coding, and his do-it-yourself attitude shaped the fundamental development principles of Sky Mavis. Anything that didn't meet his standards, he'd say: we can build it better.
Axie Infinity
As an example, until early 2020, Sky Mavis was building Axie on the Loom network, a scaling tool for Ethereum, a popular platform for blockchain games that require higher processing speeds and lower fees. But when Loom moved to focus on enterprise use cases, shutting down its public dapp (decentralized application) service and changing its architecture, Sky Mavis chose to abandon it in favor of building its own sidechain.
Their peers may wonder why Sky Mavis would waste time building its own blockchain instead of something that already exists that is easy to use. Nguyen does not believe that existing sidechains and layer2 platforms are suitable for Axie. As for optimistic rollups or zk-rollups, he insists that their rollout will be delayed, and in any case, it will take a long time for them to mature and achieve adoption. Ultimately, he was right about the rollups, and if Sky Mavis had waited for it, there would be no Ronin today.
According to Delphi Digital research data, the launch of Ronin is a critical moment for the entire NFT game market and a key catalyst for the explosive growth of Axie Infinity from May to June, with daily active users increasing from 38,000 at the end of April to 252,000. The game currently has nearly 3 million daily active users, and Ronin's transaction volume is roughly four times the daily transaction volume of the Ethereum blockchain.
The unveiling of the Ronin showed the public the vision of Sky Mavis.
better than the best
"The Last Dance" is a documentary series on Netflix that follows Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls to their sixth National Basketball Association title in eight seasons. Considered by some to be the greatest basketball player of all time, Jordan was known for his relentless work ethic and competitive edge. Dedicated and ambitious, he displayed a strong desire to learn and become a better player throughout his career, with a famous promise to his coach: "No one will work as hard as I do."
When Larsen watched the documentary, he felt a sense of déjà vu. Like Jordan, Nguyen wants his team to improve, perform better, live up to his standards and put in the same effort that he did.
Team members attest that Nguyen is a stickler for quality, with a keen eye for detail. They said he was the hardest working man on the team, had the highest expectations and performed to an almost impossible standard. During the first full year, all employees are contracted to work a six-day week, Monday through Saturday. His rigor scares some employees, but he does it to make the whole team better. He is as hard on himself as he is on others.
Aside from his tough exterior, Nguyen fits the stereotype of a reserved, reclusive genius. He rarely gives interviews or interacts with investors, leaving Zirlin and Larsen to deal with outside partners such as Delphi Digital, the New York-based consultancy responsible for Axie’s dual-token system.
Nguyen hates distractions and believes in teamwork, which is why Sky Mavis has five co-founders. For external affairs, the energetic Zirlin is in charge of community management, the low-key Larsen is in charge of fundraising and investor relations, and Nguyen, Ho and Masamune are in charge of internal operations in Vietnam.
However, until mid-2018, Nguyen had to do a lot of the work himself. He does the vast majority of coding, product and user experience design, quality assurance, and deployment. He provides feedback on artwork and is also building community. When he was still going to Discord every day, he would answer every question.
Times were tough then. The money was running out, the co-founders didn't pay themselves for a while in 2018, and the company barely made any money. The pre-sale and land sale of the Axie creature raised much-needed capital for the fledgling startup, enabling Sky Mavis to sell the game's NFT to its community members to fund business development. A $1.5 million seed round announced in early 2019, led by Animoca Brands, also helped. But before that, Sky Mavis received a poor bid for 50% of the company for $1 million.
"We never stopped building," ZirLin said. "Some people on the team have been working every day since 2018 without a break."
Though tough, Nguyen emphasized fairness and approached issues with an analytical mind, his colleagues said. Faced with the challenge, he asked his colleagues to build a mental model to communicate and defend their reasons for a proposed course of action. That way, others can better understand the problem, ask about it and contribute their thoughts. Nguyen is leading by example.
meet me in metaverse
Andy Ho, the fifth and last co-founder of Sky Mavis, joined Sky Mavis in August 2018 as Chief Technology Officer. Although he was the last to join the co-founding team, he has known Trung the longest. Long before the word "metaverse" was a buzzword, the two teamed up to compete in online competitions and battle academic opponents around the world.
These online competitive games are great practice for improving your skills when competing at an elite school level, such as the National Olympic Games. They are also an escape for gifted and talented teens like Nguyen and Ho, who find it difficult to find and connect with others in their hometown who understand their way of thinking.
After high school, Ho attended university in Singapore, was selected to participate in the 2015 ICPC competition in Morocco, and received internships at Google and PayPal in the US. But the quality of life overseas has never been as good as in Vietnam, and Ho can't help but feel a sense of wanting to go home. He finally made the leap when he saw that Nguyen used to work at Anduin Transactions, a San Francisco-based company. Anduin was well paid and obviously looking for talent, so Ho applied too.
But after more than two years on the job, Ho confides in Nguyen, admitting he's getting bored with financial software and longing for something cooler. After Ho resigned from Anduin a few months before joining Axie full-time, Trung jumped at the opportunity to bring Ho into his team.
"This is just the beginning," Nguyen said. "We had the opportunity to work together and compete with other teams around the world," he told Ho, viewing Sky Mavis' mission and vision as just another programming competition. Ho was persuaded, and he immediately handed in his resignation at Anduin. That was a pivotal moment for Nguyen, when he finally felt he could let go of the controls and let someone else take the lead in DevOps.
Throughout 2021, the team has soared, raising $7.5 million in a Series A round led by Libertus Capital and $152 million in a Series B round led by a16z and Accel Partners. With a truly global strategy from the start - with less than 3% of Axie's 2.6 million daily active users coming from within Vietnam, the company has reached out to gamers from every corner of the globe with top-tier titles in a way blockchain has never done before.
Their success has also boosted Vietnam's industry, driving local job creation and sparking a wave of entrepreneurial innovation. Lots of new indie game studios are doing business right now. Cyball, Sipher, and Thetan Arena are three recent examples of blockchain games that have emerged in Vietnam. Rumor has it that some VCs have even set up funds dedicated to the new Vietnamese-born blockchain game.
These are the results of Vietnam's long-term investment in technology and education. Geniuses like Nguyen are nurtured by a system designed to foster excellence.
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[Disclaimer] Chain games are an emerging sector with extremely high risks. Before you fully understand it, you must not invest blindly. All the descriptions and expressions in this article do not constitute any investment advice.