Title: The Crazy Palworld: Is the Explosive Game at the Beginning of the Year Actually the New Work of the Founder of Japan's Largest Exchange?

Author: Kaori

Editor: Zhang Wen

Recently, an open-world game "Palworld" has become extremely popular across the internet, becoming the first explosive dark horse game of 2024. Despite some skepticism from Pokémon fans, it firmly occupies the top spot in Steam's game popularity rankings. It achieved sales of over 1 million within 8 hours of its release, and over 2 million within 24 hours. In less than 6 days, it surpassed 8 million in sales.

In the game Palworld, the magical creatures inhabiting various regions are collectively referred to as "Palu." Players can capture Palu as companions using Palu Balls, and these companion Palu can not only fight alongside players but also transform into weapons, mounts, and even tools. This gameplay is somewhat similar to Nintendo's Pokémon, but Palworld does not delve too much into evolutionary differences, RPG development, and strategic battles. Instead, it emphasizes the sense of companionship with characters and Palu living and fighting together (players fighting side by side), which is exactly the gameplay that Pokémon fans have longed for.

As the game's popularity continues to soar, people have become curious about this low-cost game with only four early developers. Some have discovered that Takuro Mizobe, the co-founder of Palworld's publisher Pocket Pair, previously founded a cryptocurrency trading platform. Takuro's X account profile also identifies him as the "Coincheck Founder."

Upon searching Takuro Mizobe's resume, it was found that he graduated from the top science school in Japan, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and then worked as an engineer at JPMorgan. In 2014, he returned to Japan and co-founded the company 株式会社レジュプレス with his partners. As the chief engineer, Takuro Mizobe utilized his technical background and financial knowledge to create network products, manage legal agreements, and launch Coincheck's trading business.

Image Source: Coincheck Document

In less than three years, Coincheck's yen trading volume accounted for about 40% of the Japanese market, making it one of the largest cryptocurrency trading platforms in Japan at the time. Perhaps the name may still be unfamiliar to you, but Coincheck was once the most popular trading platform in Japan.

In January 2018, Coincheck was hacked, resulting in the loss of approximately 500 million (about 530 million USD) NEM token assets, becoming a permanent pain in the process of cryptocurrency in Japan, alongside Mt.Gox. Subsequently, under the supervision of Japanese financial institutions, Coincheck compensated nearly 90% of the users' losses. In the same year, in April, the Monex Group announced the acquisition of all shares of Coincheck for 3.6 billion yen (approximately 33.5 million USD).

This acquisition led to a complete takeover of Coincheck, with the founding management team stepping down. Thereafter, there was no specific mention of Takuro Mizobe in relation to Coincheck. Not long ago, another co-founder of Coincheck, Koichiro Wada, posted on X, stating that they had almost completely abandoned Coincheck due to Pocket Pair.

"Although I am a co-founder, when I said 'I want to make games,' we completely abandoned the development of Coincheck together and started making games," commented Coincheck co-founder Koichiro Wada when celebrating Palworld's sales exceeding 2 million.

In 2015, Takuro Mizobe founded the game publishing company Pocket Pair, responsible for the game planning, development, and operation of Palworld. Given its connection with Coincheck, it may be expected that Palworld could be integrated with cryptocurrency. This is not unprecedented, as in September 2020, Coincheck announced a collaboration with the blockchain game development platform Enjin to launch Japan's first NFT trading market "Coincheck NFT" by the end of the year, and to create NFTs for the game "Minecraft."

In March 2022, Coincheck NFT announced support for NFT land transactions on the metaverse platform Decentraland. On the virtual land of Decentraland, Coincheck plans to launch a project to create a virtual city "Oasis KYOTO" in 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 reached a strategic partnership with Animoca Brands, with Animoca Brands being responsible for IP and content development as a blockchain game producer, while Coincheck will play a role in distribution and community development in the Japanese market, and both parties will create a community for creators and users.

Animoca Brands has always been focused on the game and NFT tracks in the crypto VC. If the popularity of Palworld continues, perhaps we can expect whether Palworld will enter the cryptocurrency field in the future.

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