Recently, an open-world game "Palworld" has become popular all over the Internet, becoming the first popular dark horse game in 2024. Despite being questioned by some Pokémon fans, it still firmly occupies the first place in the popularity of Steam games, with sales exceeding 1 million within 8 hours of its launch, 2 million sales in 24 hours, and more than 8 million sales in less than 6 days.
In the Palworld game, the magical creatures that inhabit various areas are collectively called Palu, and Palu can be captured as a companion by using the Palu Ball, which can not only fight with the player, but also turn into weapons, mounts, and even tools. It's somewhat similar to the gameplay of Nintendo's Pokémon, but Palworld doesn't dwell too much on differential evolution, RPG development, and strategic battles, instead emphasizing the sense of companionship with the character and Palu (players fighting side by side), which is exactly what Pokémon fans once dreamed of.
As the game's popularity only increased, curiosity began to arise about this low-budget game with only four early developers. It was discovered that Takuro Mizobe, the co-founder of Palworld's issuer Pocket Pair, had previously founded a cryptocurrency trading platform, and Takuro also called himself "Coincheck Founder" in his X account profile.
A search of Takuro Mizobe's resume revealed that he graduated from Tokyo Institute of Technology, one of Japan's top science schools, and joined JPMorgan Chase as an engineer after graduation. In 2014, he returned to Japan and co-founded Co., Ltd. with his partner, and as a principal engineer, Takuro Mizobe used his technical background and financial knowledge to create web products and manage legal agreements, launching Coincheck's trading business.
图源：Coincheck 文档 In less than three years, Coincheck accounted for about 40% of the Japanese market in terms of yen trading volume, making it one of the largest virtual currency trading platforms in Japan at the time. You may be relatively unfamiliar with the name, but Coincheck used to be the most popular trading platform in Japan.
In January 2018, Coincheck was hacked and lost about 500 million (about $530 million) in NEM token assets, which together with Mt. Gox became an eternal pain in the process of cryptocurrency in Japan, and then Coincheck compensated users for nearly 90% of the losses under the supervision of Japanese financial institutions. In April of the same year, Monex Group announced the acquisition of all shares of Coincheck for 3.6 billion yen (about $33.5 million).
The acquisition left Coincheck in its entirety and the founding management team out of the way, and the news about Coincheck since then did not specifically mention Takuro Mizobe. Not long ago, Koichiro Wada, another co-creator of Coincheck, also posted on X that they had almost completely abandoned Coincheck because of Pocket Pair.
"Even though I was a co-founder, when I said, 'I want to make a game,' we completely abandoned Coincheck, which we had developed together, and started making games. Coincheck co-founder Koichiro Wada commented at Takuro Mizobe as he celebrated Palworld's sales of more than 2 million.
Takuro Mizobe founded Pocket Pair, a game publishing company, in 2015 to plan, develop, and operate Palworld's games. Because this is not a precedent, in September 2020, Coincheck announced that it would launch Japan's first NFT trading marketplace "Coincheck NFT" at the end of the year in collaboration with blockchain game development platform Enjin and create NFTs for the game "Minecraft".
In March 2022, Coincheck NFT announced its support for NFT land trading on metaverse platform Decentraland. On Decentraland's virtual land, Coincheck plans to launch a project to create a virtual city "Oasis KYOTO" by 2035 and announced that the project will be used as a place for communication and community development between artists and fans. In October of the same year, Coincheck and Animoca Brands entered into a strategic partnership, with Animoca Brands being responsible for IP and content development as a blockchain game producer, while Coincheck will take on the role of distribution and community development in the Japanese market, and the two parties will also create communities for creators and users.
Animoca Brands has been paying more attention to games and NFT tracks in crypto VCs, and if Palworld's popularity can continue, it may be possible to look forward to whether Palworld will be able to enter the crypto field in the future.