Trung Nguyễn was intrigued by CryptoKitties because it combined something he loved – games – with something he hated – blockchain. It was late 2017
Trung Nguyễn was intrigued by CryptoKitties because it combined something he loved – games – with something he hated – blockchain. It was late 2017 and the initial coin offering (ICO) boom was in full swing. All he saw were bad actors trying to scoop up a lot of money. In his eyes, the entire point of most ICOs was only to raise funds and all the applications were boring. Just fintech stuff. Numbers on a screen.
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But Nguyễn couldn’t help feeling curious about the idea of applying blockchain technology to something fun. So he went through the pain of buying ETH (the native token of the Ethereum network), setting up a MetaMask wallet and buying his first Kitty. The game itself was very simple – kind of like playing Nickelodeon’s Neopets with the added novelty of cryptocurrency transactions. Compared with other titles that Nguyễn had loved, including real-time strategy games like Red Alert and Age of Empires, and multiplayer online battle arena games like DotA, CryptoKitties left Nguyễn somewhat underwhelmed.
His inner engineer, however, was utterly enamored with the complex breeding mechanics underpinning the digital cat craze. CryptoKitties were non-fungible tokens (NFTs) represented as a unique long number, their genetic code, on the Ethereum blockchain. No two Kitties were created equally; each feline was defined by its set of “cattributes,” with unique physical traits and a personality all its own. And when Kitties would “breed” together, their genes would combine so that the offspring would have some mix of those cattributes, based on their lineage.
This presented a fascinating puzzle for Nguyễn, and would eventually inspire him to create Axie Infinity, the breakthrough game that popularized play-to-earn video games and catapulted the entire blockchain gaming sector into the spotlight this year.
Using what limited information he had about the existing Kitties that had been born, and the genes of their parents, Nguyễn began to map the data back to the source code to learn how the breeding algorithm worked and understand the exact probabilities of breeding specific offspring with desirable traits.
“It’s a pretty natural thing with being an engineer, because we see things at a deeper level,” Nguyễn said, explaining how the urge to unravel the mystery is innate within him. “We try to understand everything happening behind the scenes, instead of just seeing the surface.”
That has long been true of Nguyễn. He represented Vietnam in Yekaterinburg, Russia, at the 2014 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) – the oldest, largest and most prestigious programming contest in the world. Those who make it to the finals are the Olympic athletes of their field.
Entering those kinds of competitions is Nguyễn’s idea of fun. Something of an academic adrenaline junkie, he revels in the thrill of going up against other brilliant minds to push the limits of his own abilities. The task of reverse-engineering the CryptoKitties genome was just another technical challenge, and once he saw how the technology could be used to create something fun and meaningful, it changed his mind about blockchain technology.
With the belief that blockchain adoption would come through simple, elegant, decentralized applications, rather than from boring financial software, Nguyễn came up with the idea to build a game of his own – similar to CryptoKitties but more exciting. He reached out to Tu Doan, better known by his pseudonym, Masamune, and pitched the idea.
Years earlier, Nguyễn and Masamune had been co-founders in Lozi, a venture capital-backed social network for food bloggers. Existing media articles say they were childhood friends, which is untrue, but it’s easy to see how the confusion came about. The similarities between their backstories is uncanny. As kids, both were heavily influenced by Japanese culture – they loved Pokémon, devoured manga (Japanese comics, cartoons and graphic novels) such as One Piece and played Asia’s answer to “Magic: The Gathering,” the collectible card game “Yu-Gi-Oh!”
They also loved to make their own games and get their school friends to play them. While Nguyễn drew characters on trading cards, Masamune liked to create board games, gluing his original avatars to Vietnamese coins for the game pieces. Masamune also enjoyed creating creatures out of food, using toothpicks to stick accessories into their potato bodies.
During their Lozi days, the two often discussed their shared passion for video games. As a hardcore gamer, Nguyễn researched the games he played, picking apart the mechanics and rules, while Masamune got into the storylines and graphics. It was then that Masamune told Nguyễn about his dream…
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