Albert Chen - Genopets Co-Founder and CEO, EP 13

As the world's first move-to-earn NFT game, Genopets is making it fun and rewarding to live an active lifestyle.

Co-founder and CEO Albert Chen joins Brian Friel to discuss Genopets' unique approach to web3 gaming. 

Show Notes: 

00:56 - What is GenoPets?

01:33 - Tracked by Mobile

03:00 - Geopets similar to Tamagotchi

03:44 - Background / Why build on Solana

06:56 - User demographics

08:33 - Thinking about an in-game economy

10:57 - How to use GenoPets

14:00 - SFTs and Crossovers with other games

15:14 - Sustainability for in-game economy

18:35  - What's next on the Roadmap     

19:38 - Turn-based battles                

20:21 - A builder he admires             

22:02 - Contact info       

Full Transcript: 

Brian (00:05):

Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the web 3.0 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce our guests today, Albert Chen. Albert is the co-founder, CEO and CTO of Genopets, a revolutionary note, free-to-play NFT game that's on mobile and is already at 300,000 plus users. Albert, welcome to the show.

Albert (00:34):

Hey, thanks Brian. Great to be here. Huge fan of Phantom as well.

Brian (00:38):

Excited to be talking with you as well, big fans of what you guys have been up to. I think there's a lot of folks listening to this podcast who may have heard what Genopets is. They made a scene, a few Genopets flying around on Twitter. But for the uninitiated, can you give us a little overview of who you are and then also what is Genopets?

Albert (00:56):

Yeah, so Genopets is a free-to-play move-to-earn NFT mobile game that makes it fun and rewarding to live an active lifestyle. A Genopet is a digital pet that you own and it evolves and grows as you become more active in life. The steps that you take every day powers your journey through the Genoverse as you explore battle and evolve, and you have the ability to earn and create NFTs while you play it.

Brian (01:22):

That's super cool. And so this is all tied to mobile, is that correct? Essentially you're able to track steps, an end user, how active they are throughout the day and have that influence the actual NFT?

Albert (01:34):

Yeah, exactly. So we are a native mobile app that you can now download from the app store for iOS and the Google Play store for Androids. We have a clear separation of concern in terms of our mobile app and our web app. So we also have a web app, and that's our web 3.0 platform that you can access through the Phantom browser actually. We made it mobile first so it's compatible on mobile devices as well as your desktop. These two experiences are separated for good reason. The mobile game experience is targeted towards any gamers and/or any fitness fanatic because it's very easy to download and just get started.

(02:12):

Once you download the app, you can summon a Genopet by answering a survey. Then once you get your Genopet, you can start leveling up and evolving it and caring for it. It's not until you want to really explore the other side, the NFT side of the game that you have to create a wallet, connect your account on our web app, and you can buy a Habitat and do crafting. We consider web 3.0 an expansion pack to the mobile game experience.

Brian (02:37):

I love the phrasing of that. It reminds me a lot of something like a Tamagotchi if you were around in the '90s like that long ago, or Pokemon kind of being tied in with this pet that can do battles, but you have to care for it and it's reflective of you and you kind of develop your own personal relationship and. I think that makes a lot of sense to kind of tie on the web 3.0 NFT component as an added on bonus to that.

Albert (03:01):

Yeah, absolutely. It's funny that you mentioned Tamagotchi because the first phase of our game loop, we literally internally call it the Tamagotchi loop because it's about growing your pet, caring for it, and then when we come out with Augmentation, you can customize your pet to look however you want. So that completes a whole game loop of what we call the Tamagotchi loop.

Brian (03:20):

That's super cool. You mentioned kind of the early days there, you guys calling it the Tamagotchi loop early on. I'm curious to hear maybe a little more before we dive into Genopets about your background specifically. You have a really unique framing of, you have this web 2.0-like game with a web 3.0 expansion pack. What is your background specifically and what led you to want to build a game in this way? And then why also did you choose Solana?

Albert (03:44):

Me personally, I've been a web developer since, I mean as early as 1999. Back then I was just building fun web experiences. I guess back then you could call it web 1.0. We wrote Perl scripts and that ran on websites that allowed us to build discussion boards and guess books and such. That's where I really came from. And then I started doing consumer products such as houseware goods. There was a brand that my co-founder, Ben and I, created called Unbrands. It was a line of products that allow you to hang anything on the wall anywhere without the damaging your wall. So we did that and we had a whole eCommerce layer to it, and this was in the early 2010s. And because of that, we've been working together for over a decade now and got into blockchain together in 2017.

(04:32):

One of our dreams was to solve this crisis that we see in the next 50 years of humanity, which is a lot of jobs that used to have value are slowly taken over by Ai and we want to be able to allow people to earn passive income through one way or another.

(04:50):

When we discovered blockchain, we thought it was a really good way of unlocking that. So in 2018 we had a project on the EOS blockchain called GeneOs. GeneOS was a decentralized health data marketplace. Essentially we wanted to create this rental marketplace for health data that allows people to monetize it and rent it to pharmaceutical companies or researchers that needed. We won the EOS Global Hackathon in 2018.

(05:16):

What ended up happening was we realized that that model was too top down instead of bottom up. There wasn't a lot of demand for this kind of data, at least not now in the technology for it. It doesn't exist yet, it requires a lot of progress and zero knowledge, machine learning and stuff. So we closed that down in 2020. And Ben, my co-founder, had the idea that the health data doesn't have to be boring, it can be something fun. What if it was represented as a pet? And back then we originally, our idea was that your health data would be an NFT and your NFT, it was a more boring version of NFT where your NFT would just be metadata on what your health records look like. But it was his idea that we can make that health record look like an actual pet that evolves as you become healthier.

(06:06):

So that was a breakthrough. And in 2021 we decided to relaunch the project, and this time on Solana because when we were evaluating different blockchains in the spring and summer of 2021, Solana was just coming up and I was very impressed with the TPS and the community that was growing behind it at the time. And to this day, I still think it's one of the biggest successes in Layer 1 history.

Brian (06:28):

That's so cool. That framing too of using health data and making it actually fun and something that turning it from this kind of dull dead thing that you don't care about to now it's represented as this ever evolving pet that you have an emotional attachment to, you care about, you want to continue to nurture that. That's a really cool framing. I love that.

(06:47):

I guess turning back to Genopets now, can you give us a sense of who your users are, maybe where they're distributed in the world?

Albert (06:55):

Yeah, we have a pretty global audience. Everyone around the world, pretty much every country you can think of. But our largest communities are in Japan, US, France, Russia, and India actually. This is just by the amount of activity that happens in our Discord. We have a fairly large Discord community by our players. The demographics is interesting. When we did a survey a few months ago, 70% of our players did not have any prior crypto experience before coming onto our platform. So we really think that web 3.0 gaming is going to be the springboard to get people onboarded into web 3.0.

Brian (07:32):

Oh, wow.

Albert (07:33):

We call it a Trojan horse of web 3.0.

Brian (07:35):

Yeah, I've definitely heard that Trojan Horse analogy before. That's pretty wild. 72%?

Albert (07:41):

70%. Every time that we measure this metric, it's actually going up. So there's a metric that we measure internally, which is what percentage of our players have never touched the blockchain while playing Genopets. And right now it's 80% as of last week.

Brian (07:55):

Wow, that's wild. I'm curious. You have this global audience across a number of different countries. I'd say we see as well in Phantom, like the US, certain parts of EU and certain parts of Asia as well are like there's some fairly crypto native communities there. But then as you're expanding that global reach, it doesn't surprise me that you're saying almost 70 to 80% of folks aren't touching blockchains. How do you think about that when you're designing a game that has these economic components as well? I mean, I know that you guys are free-to-play. Is that a big factor into that decision making and how do you kind of think high level about creating an in-game economy?

Albert (08:33):

From the very beginning, free-to-play has been one of the key pillars of how we wanted to build this economy. The thinking is that there's a whole other meta game inside of Genopets that's optional for the player, and that's the ability to become a merchant in this world. What that means is when you're playing the mobile Genopets' game, you don't have to think about how your items are received. If you want to level up your pet a little faster or you want that really cool weapon or really cool body part that we call Augment, you can just buy it directly on the mobile app. And on the other side of that transaction will be the merchant class player that cares a little bit more about the earning aspect of the game that are a little more crypto savvy. They can then log into our web 3.0 portal, connect their phantom wallet, buy a Habitat, and start crafting all kinds of items that people can use in the game.

(09:30):

So we like to call this the seller central, as an Amazon, the seller central of our game experience. So you have the demand side of the economy, which is made up of all players in the world, the same as any free-to-play game. And then you have the supply side, which in traditional gaming would be the game publisher, but here it's a little different, right? So we have the players create items for other players to consume and we take a fee in that.

(10:00):

The idea is that when you start enabling that, then you kind of get into a flywheel where if more people play, then more people will want to craft items and then there will be more content for people to consume and drives the other side of economy and you have this network effect that happens. Now, the end goal here is that through the governance of the actual game itself, the community can create new items themselves with stats that people vote on and move them into the game and complete this entire loop and allow this ecosystem to grow by itself.

Brian (10:31):

That's super cool. You mentioned a couple terms in there, I just want to hit on real quick. You mentioned crafting, which I feel like is this whole extra element to the game. There's Habitats as well. Habitats though being distinct NFTs separate from your actual Genopets for myself and also for folks listening as an end user, if I wanted to come and check out Genopets today, what should I be going to first? How do I kind of orient myself in this world where there's all these different components?

Albert (10:57):

Your Genopet is the main character that you use to play this game. It does not have to be an NFT. If you want, you can just download the app and you can create a Genopet. Later on, we will enable the ability to mint these Genopets as NFTs on chain after it reaches a certain level.

(11:14):

But if you want to go one step further into the game economy, the next step is looking at Habitats. So what Habitats are, they are NFTs where your Genopets can live in. But its main ability is the ability to mint SFTs and NFTs. It can convert the energy that you gain by walking in the game into what we call our KI token. The KI token is the main utility token in our ecosystem that drives everything.

(11:42):

So this mechanic is already out on Mainnet. We have tens of thousands of people using these on chain programs every day. What's coming in the next few weeks is the crafting part of it. So right now your Habitats can refine crystals every day, and these are building blocks of the game. Eventually these crystals can be combined to create Augments for your pet or toys or energy boosts, and these are items that you must have a Habitat in order to create.

(12:11):

We've created this program, an on chain program, that utilizes randomness to create what we call on chain loot box system. So every time you craft it, we have a bunch of recipes. The discovery of the recipe components is fun in itself, but the main mechanic that we're using here is that every time you craft, there's a different possibility of what item you end up getting. You can get a rare item or a common item or an uncommon item. It's almost like a digital booster pack. So components or ingredients in, item out. That's what crafting is. And then the end item, you can use endgame for energy boosts or you can use it to customize your Genopet, change your color of your Genopet, or add attributes, add attacks or defenses, what we call moves when we eventually launch battle.

Brian (12:59):

That's super cool. And then all these that you just mentioned, you mentioned the energy boosts, a lot of these are SFTs on Solana today?

Albert (13:06):

That's correct, yeah. So the only NFTs that we have right now are Genopets and Habitats, and that's because they're all unique. Items are SFTs because they are semi-unique, let's say. So like earth crystals for example, one earth crystal should not be different from another earth crystal. So to save for a variety of reasons, engineering reasons, enforcement of training fees and all of that, we prefer and we decided to build all of these items as SFTs and it's been working very well for us.

Brian (13:39):

That's super cool. I'm curious, and this might be getting too much into sharing deep roadmap stuff, but given that these things are on chain, they're SFTs, there's a world in which they could compose with other programs outside of Genopets, have you guys thought about that as well? Maybe having crossovers with other games or other DeFi platforms of some kind?

Albert (14:00):

Oh yeah, absolutely. It's a huge part of why we even built this economy on chain, right? Without the composability aspect of it, there is no point. We could just use a private database. Right now we are in talks with some DeFi protocols. I mean the whole SFT trading platform was built on Serum with the help of Magic Eden. So Magic Eden composes Serum where our SFTs are trading. And because they are SFTs, they can be probably put into an AMM a lot easier and you can probably do some kind of staking with it. So that's all future roadmap stuff and we're going to see where it goes. But yes, absolutely. Composability. I know it's something that everybody says, but it is definitely a huge part of what we do.

Brian (14:43):

Yeah, that's super cool. Exciting to think that you guys are thinking along those lines as well. I guess switching back, you mentioned KI token as well. We hit on it briefly with the fact that you guys are free-to-play, but do you have any thoughts on maybe more broadly for if there's a game developer listening to this, any sort of principles you're keeping in mind for when you're developing kind of a sustainable in-game economy? We've seen a few examples with Stepn that gain massive adoption quickly and then fizzle out. I'm curious, did you guys have any kind of guiding principles that guide you on this journey?

Albert (15:15):

So I think sustainable at game economy is something that everyone's trying to figure out and nobody has really been able to get it correct yet. Our high level vision is what I was describing earlier. If you make it so that the economy is based on people trading with one another instead of the money being paid in by newcomers into the ecosystem, then it can be more sustainable. However, it's not as simple as saying just removing growth from the equation and all is good. You still need growth, but it has to be sustainable in a way that growth contributes to the game economy in a slow but steady manner.

(15:53):

So one of the things that we designed in the very beginning is that if you want to earn KI tokens, you have to pay into the economy somehow. So this whole concept of free-to-play to earn doesn't really exist in the sense that you can earn for free. You can play for free, but if you want to earn, then you have to invest in either a Habitat or someone has to terraform, that's the word we use for create. Someone has to create a Habitat for you to rent and convert your energy into KI tokens. So that's number one, which is you always have to have some kind of pay in.

(16:29):

The second part is making sure that the growth is sustainable. So we constantly measure our emissions versus burn. We've been doing a decent job at it. I think we are still under, in terms of the net KI emitted in the last two months. So we've been live, our earning part of the game has been live for two months now. We've had some ups and downs. We went through a three week period where it was a very high net emissions. Then we started changing some rules around.

(16:57):

One of the biggest rule changes that we made was that level 1 pets cannot earn as much energy as let's say a level 22 pet. Before, it was already the case, but the difference wasn't that high. And that meant that you didn't have to put in that much work to start earning the maximum amount, which was not sustainable. Once we've changed that, our emission schedule decreased quite significantly and it's looking fairly healthy. But as I said earlier, you can't just take growth out of the equation. We do have to still grow users. We still have to introduce crafting to make sure that there's demand for the content. And at the end of the day, if you have growing demand for content, then it would be sustainable in the long term.

Brian (17:40):

It's such a tricky problem that's above my head. It's all the gig of brains are figuring out the engineering, the economy around this. But it's really exciting that you guys are already seeing this kind of organic growth and excitement around this. I think it makes a ton of sense.

Albert (17:53):

Yeah. And it's super hard. Everything is hard mode right now because we're in deep winter, so no one's really speculating. No one's trying to buy thousands of dollars in NFTs thinking they'll make their money back in a few months. So you really have to get the fundamentals correct. Yeah, it's very different from Axie Infinity or a Stepn, the times have changed.

Brian (18:14):

Yeah, yeah. You guys get a chance to lay the right foundation though in the bear market. There's been many stories of that, even Solana being one of them, that generational crypto companies are built in the bear market.

(18:26):

I guess you hit on it a little bit with some experiments you guys are thinking around composability. Is there anything else that you can share with us for what's next on your guys' roadmap?

Albert (18:35):

Yeah, so like I mentioned earlier, I think on chain crafting is going to be a huge one. Once on chain crafting is out, there's a lot of composability elements that you can create just on chain. We'll leave that up to the creativity of the community. That's the biggest one because we needed to start completing our Tamagotchi loop, which ends with augmentation. Augmentation is when you craft an item that has a body part, you can switch out the body part of your pet and immediately reflect on chain and end game. So that's the biggest thing that's going to happen in the next two, three months. And then after that it's battle. So we're going to allow people to... I mean, once you start customizing your pet and your pet looks super cool, what's next? You obviously want to compete with other people. That will be our battle loop. The battle loop is something that we really look forward to because that will complete the second phase of our game, and that is likely when we will start ungating the game for the rest of the world.

Brian (19:32):

Is this battle loop that you're foreshadowing here, is this turn-based battle? Or is this more live action pet battles?

Albert (19:38):

It's turn-based battle. You can think of it as small mini games, reaction games, and then it's partly skilled based and then partly attribute based. So the stronger a pet is, the easier it is for them to win and battle. And there's going to be elemental parts of it as well so there's some strategy involved.

Brian (19:57):

I love it. Young gamer me right now is itching to get my hands on some Genopets right now, so we'll have to follow after the show on that.

Albert (20:05):

Yeah, that would be awesome.

Brian (20:06):

Well, Albert, this has been an awesome discussion. Really appreciate you coming on and sharing the vision of Genopets and what you guys have all been up to. One closing question we always ask all our guests, and I want to know from you as well, is who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?

Albert (20:21):

Yeah, so that's a great question because there's so many great builders in Solana, but there's one guy that I've worked with in the past for our KI token launch actually that I greatly admire, and that's Noah Prince from Strata Protocol. I just think he has a giga brain that's able to figure out one of the hardest things in the token launch ecosystem. And he did it so well and I haven't seen a protocol that's done it better since then. And when we worked together, there were some small bugs that we had when we were using their protocol and he just hopped on it right away and within a few hours fixed everything, submitted a pull request, and then we were able to pull from that and launch our KI token pretty quickly. So I got to say it's him.

Brian (21:05):

Oh, that's awesome. So you guys used Strata actually to launch KI?

Albert (21:08):

Yeah. Yeah, we launched KI on Strata. It was an interesting one because you never know what's going to happen. It was a three day sale. And the first two days there were almost no volume and you're like, "Ugh, God, we're not going to sell out. This is bad." And it turns out every, it's like a game of chicken. Everyone's just waiting. And as soon as somebody start buying, we had almost 2 million sold in a few hours. It's a crazy journey.

Brian (21:32):

Yeah. Market wide incentives like that happening in real time, it's pretty cool to see. And I totally echo the sentiment around him as well. I think he goes by @redacted_noah on Twitter. He was actually paramount to work with me when we were first getting SFT support in Phantom actually earlier this year as well.

Albert (21:48):

Oh, awesome. I didn't know that. That's fantastic.

Brian (21:51):

He's everywhere at once. We'll have to tag him on Twitter to let him know that. Shout out.

Albert (21:56):

Awesome. Yeah.

Brian (21:57):

Well, Albert, this has been awesome. Really appreciate you coming on. Where can folks go to learn more about Genopets?

Albert (22:02):

Yeah, they can go on our website, genopets.me or follow our Twitter, @Genopets, and they can get all the information there.

Brian (22:10):

Awesome. Love it. Albert Chen, founder, CEO, CTO of Genopets, thanks for coming on.

Albert (22:15):

Thanks Brian. That was fun.