Simon Vieira, CEO of MixMob, a Solana gaming platform, hails from a AAA gaming background. He has worked at EA, at FIFA PokerStars and understands Web2 gaming very well. He also understands the mentality behind these companies.
“They tend to be conservative when it comes to change and they want to see someone else be successful before they jump in – and they also want the legal side to be more black and white.”
He sees the challenge of combining the excitement of Web2 games with Web3 mechanics: “The tokenomics have to work,” he says. “We need fun games that are competitive and use blockchain for it is good for, ie payments, microtransactions and ownership.”
MixMob, rather than looking at a token raise, opted for an NFT sale instead. In 2021 it launched its first NFT collection which sold out in less than a day.
“That gave us validation from the marketplace – a blessing if you will – and then we went on to do a traditional raise with VCs and raised $7.5 million that way.”
The second collection was to build robot NFTs in the game and that raised another $2.5 million.
“We didn’t want to do an ordinary token launch where people just sell on the tokens. We had an idea to make it like a kid going into a toy shop to buy their toy. The difference is that the NFT toy comes with coupons that are redeemable for tokens to play in the game.
“It was a gamified way to launch our token.”
Each NFT cost $250 and came with the same value of tokens. The NFT robots would be played already in the game which was built so they had utility. When the traditional TGE launched, holders of the robots were airdropped the tokens.
“So, the people holding the robots already had skin it the game. They are committed already. It is also part of desire to move towards decentralization so people, with governance tokens, have a say over the IP of our universe.”
In Vieira’s view this decentralization will take between five and ten years to be achieved.
Launching a token is not the faith hearted according to Vieira. It costs a lot of money, you have to go through multiple interviews, engage market makers, and hook up APIs for both centralized and decentralized exchanges.
“It’s very complicated and we are on both, including top tier exchanges. It is a lot more complex than before and you need money in advance. The mechanics might be easier but the success rate is much tougher.”
Overall, Vieira is skeptical about random airdrops. He justifies the MixMob airdrops as the players have already committed to the game, are in the community and have an interest in the project.
