Palworld Beyond the Game: The Re-entrepreneurship Journey of Japan's Former Largest Exchange
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Palworld Beyond the Game: The Re-entrepreneurship Journey of Japan's Former Largest Exchange
Can you believe the founder of Palworld is actually the founder of Coincheck?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Kaori
A recent open-world game, Palworld, has taken the internet by storm, becoming the first breakout hit of 2024. Despite criticism from some Pokémon fans, it has firmly secured the top spot on Steam’s popularity charts—selling over 1 million copies within 8 hours, surpassing 2 million in 24 hours, and exceeding 8 million units in under six days.
In Palworld, mysterious creatures inhabiting various regions are collectively known as "Pal," which players can capture using Pal Spheres to become companions. These Pals don’t just fight alongside players—they can also transform into weapons, mounts, or even tools. While this bears similarities to Nintendo’s Pokémon series, Palworld doesn’t delve deeply into mechanics like differential evolution, RPG-style character development, or strategic battles. Instead, it emphasizes companionship—fighting and living side-by-side with Pals—which is precisely the kind of gameplay long desired by Pokémon fans.
As the game’s popularity continues to surge, curiosity has grown around this low-budget title developed by just four early team members. It was discovered that Takuro Mizobe, co-founder of Pocket Pair—the company behind Palworld—previously founded a cryptocurrency exchange platform. On his X profile, Takuro identifies himself as a “Coincheck Founder.”
Research into Takuro Mizobe’s background reveals he graduated from Tokyo Institute of Technology, one of Japan’s top science and engineering universities, and subsequently worked as an engineer at JPMorgan. In 2014, he returned to Japan and co-founded Kabushiki Gaisha Rejupuresu. As chief engineer, Takuro leveraged his technical expertise and financial knowledge to develop web products, manage legal agreements, and launch Coincheck’s trading operations.
Image source: Coincheck documentation
Within less than three years, Coincheck captured around 40% of Japan’s yen-based cryptocurrency trading volume, becoming one of the country’s largest virtual currency exchanges. You may not be familiar with the name, but in Japan, Coincheck was once the most popular trading platform.
In January 2018, Coincheck suffered a major hack resulting in the loss of approximately 500 million NEM tokens (about $530 million), marking a lasting scar on Japan’s cryptocurrency history alongside Mt. Gox. Under regulatory oversight from Japanese financial institutions, Coincheck compensated users for nearly 90% of their losses. In April that same year, Monex Group announced its acquisition of all shares of Coincheck for 3.6 billion yen (approximately $33.5 million).
This acquisition allowed the founding management team to exit completely, and since then, there have been no further public mentions of Takuro Mizobe in relation to Coincheck. Recently, another Coincheck co-founder, Koichiro Wada, posted on X stating that due to Pocket Pair, they had essentially abandoned Coincheck entirely.
“Even though I’m a co-founder, when I said ‘I want to make games,’ we completely walked away from Coincheck, the project we built together, and started making games,” commented Koichiro Wada, co-founder of Coincheck, on Takuro Mizobe’s post celebrating Palworld surpassing 2 million sales.
Takuro Mizobe founded the game publishing company Pocket Pair in 2015, overseeing Palworld’s planning, development, and operations. Given his history with Coincheck, it’s possible to anticipate future integration between Palworld and cryptocurrency. This wouldn’t be unprecedented: in September 2020, Coincheck partnered with blockchain gaming platform Enjin to launch Japan’s first NFT marketplace, “Coincheck NFT,” by year-end, including creating NFTs for the game Minecraft.
In March 2022, Coincheck NFT announced support for land transactions on the metaverse platform Decentraland. On Decentraland’s virtual land, Coincheck plans to launch a project to build a virtual city called “Oasis KYOTO” by 2035, positioning it as a space for interaction and community building between artists and fans.
In October that year, Coincheck formed a strategic partnership with Animoca Brands, where Animoca would act as a blockchain game developer responsible for IP and content creation, while Coincheck would handle distribution and community development in the Japanese market. The two companies also planned to jointly build communities for creators and users.
Animoca Brands has long been active in crypto venture capital, particularly focusing on gaming and NFT sectors. If Palworld sustains its momentum, it may well pave the way for deeper exploration into the crypto space.
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