「幻兽帕鲁」爆火背后：前日本最大交易所的再创业

The recent open world game Palworld (Palworld) has become popular all over the Internet, becoming the first dark horse game to hit in 2024. Although it has been 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 within 24 hours, and more than 8 million in less than 6 days.

In the game Palworld, the magical creatures that inhabit various areas are collectively called Palu. You can use the Palu Ball to capture Palu as your partner. The Palu that becomes your partner can not only fight with the player, but can also be turned into a weapon, Mounts and even tools. This is somewhat similar to the gameplay of the Nintendo game Pokemon, but Palworld does not involve too much differential evolution, RPG development and strategic battles. Instead, it emphasizes living and fighting with the characters and Pallu (players side by side Combat), this is the gameplay that Pokémon fans once dreamed of.

As the games popularity only grew, people began to become curious about this low-budget game with only four early developers. Some people discovered that Takuro Mizobe, the co-founder of Pocket Pair, a Palworld publishing company, had previously founded a cryptocurrency trading platform. Takuro also claimed to be Coincheck Founder in his X account profile.

Searching Takuro Mizobes resume, we found that he graduated from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japans top science school, and worked as an engineer at JPMorgan Chase after graduation. In 2014, he returned to China and co-founded レジュプレス Co., Ltd. with his partners. As chief engineer, Takuro Mizobe relied on his technical background and financial knowledge to create network products and manage legal agreements, and launched Coinchecks trading business.

Image source: Coincheck documentation

In less than three years, Coinchecks Japanese yen trading volume accounted for about 40% of the Japanese market, becoming one of the largest virtual currency trading platforms in Japan at the time. Maybe you are still unfamiliar with this name, 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 (approximately US$530 million) in NEM token assets. Together with Mt. Gox, it became a permanent pain in the process of Japanese cryptocurrency. It was subsequently under the supervision of Japanese financial institutions. Coincheck compensated nearly 90% of users’ losses. In April of the same year, Monex Group announced that it would acquire all shares of Coincheck for 3.6 billion yen (approximately US$33.5 million).

This acquisition allowed Coincheck to be completely taken over, and the founding management team retired. Since then, news about Coincheck did not specifically mention Takuro Mizobe. Not long ago, Koichiro Wada, another co-founder of Coincheck, also posted on X that they had almost completely given up on Coincheck because of Pocket Pair.

“Even though I was a co-founder, when I said, ‘I want to make games,’ we completely gave up on Coincheck, which we were developing together, and started making games. Coincheck co-founder Koichiro Wada commented when Takuro Mizobe celebrated the sales of Palworld exceeding 2 million.

Takuro Mizobe founded the game publishing company Pocket Pair in 2015 and is responsible for the game planning, development, and operation of Palworld. In view of its relationship with Coincheck, we may look forward to the possibility of combining Palworld with encryption. Because this is not a precedent, in September 2020, Coincheck announced that it would cooperate with the blockchain game development platform Enjin to launch Japans first NFT trading market Coincheck NFT at the end of the year and create NFT 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 it will use the project as a communication and community development venue between artists and fans.

In October of the same year, Coincheck and Animoca Brands reached a strategic partnership. Animoca Brands will be responsible for IP and content development as a blockchain game producer, while Coincheck will play the role of distribution and community development in the Japanese market. Both parties will also provide creators and Users create communities.

Animoca Brands has always been paying more attention to games and NFT tracks among crypto VCs. If Palworlds popularity can continue, we may be able to look forward to whether Palworld can enter the crypto field in the future.