Interview: flowie, ChainCatcher
Guest: Ricky Wong, Co-founder & CFO of Catizen
Compiled by: flowie, ChainCatcher
Catizen is one of the most popular Telegram/TON ecological mini-games this year, with more than 44 million registered users and more than 3.3 million on-chain users.
How will Catizen maintain its ecosystem growth after the September TGE? What are its strategic plans? How does Catizen view the current status and future trends of Telegram/TON ecosystem mini-games?
Recently, Catizen co-founder Ricky Wong delivered a keynote speech at the "DeInsight 2024" annual summit co-organized by Web3 asset data platform RootData and ChainCatcher. He reviewed how Catizen incentivized users to participate in the Web3 sharing economy era and announced a subsequent token repurchase plan, which will repurchase more than 10 million CATI tokens each year to give back to the community.
After the meeting, ChainCatcher also invited Ricky Wong for a dialogue interview. Ricky Wong shared in more detail the success experience of Catizen and its issuer Pluto, how to ensure sustainability in the future, and his views on the future of the Telegram/TON ecosystem.
The three steps behind Catizen
1. ChainCatcher: How did you first join the Crypto field? What was the opportunity that prompted the core team to establish Catizen?
Ricky Wong: Before joining the Crypto circle, I worked as an auditor and was familiar with risk control. Later, around 2013, I switched to private equity and hedge funds and have been investing in different fields. When the blockchain boom started in 2017, I first used my own private funds to invest in Web3 projects and Ethereum, with both profits and losses in the process.
Catizen’s other co-founder Tim and I met when we were both doing auditing. When I was doing investment, we also kept communicating about investment and Web3.
During the 2021 pandemic, Tim and I met the other two co-founders of Catizen by chance. They each have extensive experience in the blockchain and mini-game fields. We often discussed how to integrate each other's experience and resources in various fields and find a platform that can be deeply cultivated in Web3.
Let's think about how Web2 became popular. We found that a basic approach is to spend money to find people to pay for it and expand its scale. For example, Internet giants look for investors to pay for it and expand its scale. We think that Web3 is also applicable to this strategy, and the key is who is willing to pay.
We think that the public chains are the ones that are most willing to pay, so we focus on which public chains have a large enough market and user base. We talked about many public chains and finally decided to issue them on Telegram and TON first. The reason is that they are willing to give us the greatest support, and Telegram also has huge user traffic.
2. ChainCatcher: Catizen has driven the trend of Telegram mini-games to a certain extent. Why did you start with mini-games? How did you first think about sustainability?
Ricky Wong: We were attracted by the mini-program and mini-game platform launched by Telegram. It had so many users at the beginning, so we were thinking that if we want to build a sustainable economic model, we have to make people willing to spend our coins in this project or ecosystem, and we have to make this coin have application scenarios.
First of all, we considered services. We had to find the kind of services that were most easily accepted by the general public. We thought games were a good choice. So should we make deep games, Tap to Earn games, or mid-core games?
We thought about it and decided that Tap to Earn might not be sustainable. It might make the project popular at the beginning, but it would not be able to maintain the ecosystem later. Therefore, we ruled out the game route of Tap to Earn. In addition, we also knew that some Russian teams were working on Tap to Earn, and we did not want to compete with them head-on.
So what are Chinese people best at? Of course, it’s the WeChat ecosystem. We have made so many high-quality game mini-programs over the years. So, we want to bring our experience and resources in the WeChat ecosystem to the Telegram ecosystem. We chose a middle path between Tap to Earn mini-games and 3A games. We not only publish Chinese mini-games, but also various types of games, such as those that are deeply loved by GameFi users, fun and have GameFi concepts, or those that can meet the needs of boys for excitement and pleasure, and there may even be games specifically for girls’ preferences.
In addition, I would like to emphasize that our business model is actually the publisher. Many people may not know that even the game Catizen was not developed by us, we are just its publisher.
We have a distribution trilogy, providing three basic services for these potential games. First, we will help game developers connect their SDK and game engine to our system, which can greatly shorten their own processing time and quickly connect to Telegram and TON's payment interface. Secondly, we will help optimize the user experience of the first 30 seconds of the game. Because in today's era of short videos, users' attention is very limited, and the first 30 seconds of game experience is crucial. Therefore, we will focus on improving the attractiveness of this part of the content.
In addition, during the testing phase, we will first promote the game on a small scale to see how it responds in the global market. If successful, we will promote it in full, using our resources and partners such as KOLs to bring more traffic to the game.
Therefore, every time we release a new type of game, we can open up a new market and attract different user groups into our ecosystem. This is one of the reasons why we can continue to expand our influence.
As a distribution platform, Catizen is not limited to the gaming field. We will also connect to short dramas, DeFi projects, etc.
Retention rate after TGE is still higher than traditional games
3. ChainCatcher: Can you share some key data of your Catizen mini App ecosystem?
Ricky Wong: We have 44.7 million registered users. In terms of user portraits, we pay special attention to on-chain users, that is, those who have linked their wallets and have accounts. At present, the number of our on-chain users is close to 3.3 million. In the process of promoting large-scale application of Web3, we have successfully attracted many Web2 users, but how to convert them into on-chain users is an important issue we face.
Our current conversion rate is about 7.5%, which is a big improvement from the 6% we started with, and we think it will continue to grow. As more and more Web2 users around you become Web3 users, it will become more convenient in terms of discounts and interactive experience. In addition, referrals from friends and some of our activities to encourage users to link their wallets will continue to increase this conversion rate.
In addition to monthly active users, our daily active users are also worth noting. During the TGE period, the daily active users were close to 8 million, and subsequently maintained at around 2 million.
The third key data is our retention rate. We have discussed with investors and compared our retention rate with the traditional game industry. Before Catizen was ready to be listed, our seven-day retention rate exceeded 25%, which is a very amazing data. For a game that has been released for seven months, the retention rate is still so high on the seventh day before the listing.
Outsiders may think that once the token is listed, users may stop playing the game after getting the token. But in fact, for our project, even on the fourteenth day, the retention rate is still around 6%, and many users still choose to continue playing the game, indicating that after the introduction of Web3Token Economics, the user retention rate is much higher than that of traditional games.
Even after the token issuance phase, our game’s 7th and 14th day retention rates are still similar to those of traditional high-quality games. Therefore, developing high-quality games is still critical.
In addition, we have another important data, which is the number of users following our channel. Due to our large number of registered users, the number of users following our channel has reached more than 8 million. These users continue to pay attention to our new mini-programs, mini-game releases, and new Launchpool activities. This means that if we want to add advertising to the ecosystem, even if we don't add it in the game, it is feasible to add it only in our channel. But we have not taken this step yet, and we still prioritize content and ecosystem layout.
4. ChainCatcher: Looking back, you have achieved tens of millions of users, a good retention rate, and a good conversion rate from off-chain to on-chain. What did you do right?
Ricky Wong: First of all, Telegram and TON’s early support gave us a lot of traffic and resources. Their support for our Chinese team was even greater than their support for the Russian team. Including Telegram founder Pavel Durov tweeting for us, which also brought us a lot of traffic outside the Web3 circle.
The reason why we can get their huge support is that we do well in that strategically we do have a medium- and long-term plan with a cycle of 5 years, which differentiates us from some short-term and fast teams. We also continue to convey our ideas to the Telegram and TON teams and gain their trust.
In addition, I think we have done a very good job in exploring some underdeveloped markets, where the payment capacity is actually very strong. For example, in the Japanese market, we spent a lot of time and energy to cooperate with the local team to promote it.
5. ChainCatcher: There were actually some delays in your previous TGE and airdrop times. What were your considerations during this period?
Ricky Wong: Our delay is actually not that late. Our idea is to launch the token when the monthly growth is the fastest, so we set the date as September at the beginning.
But whether it is the beginning, middle or end of the month, we are also communicating with the exchange to finalize a time that is satisfactory to all. In September, some very important macro data will be released in the United States. We are worried that the results will not meet market expectations and will affect investor confidence. Therefore, we finally decided that it will be no later than September 20.
Will expand the multi-chain ecosystem, not limited to the field of small games
6. ChainCatcher: The airdrop expectation after the listing has ended. What other actions will Catizen take to ensure the continued growth of the ecosystem?
Ricky Wong: On the one hand, we continue to launch high-quality mini-games to attract users. For example, the game we released (Bombie) has attracted 6 million users and 6 million in revenue within 3 months of its launch, which has surpassed Catizen's performance in the same period. We plan to launch a mini-game similar to the community's favorite every month. At the same time, we are not limited to mini-games, and will expand to short dramas, DeFi and other short, fast and explosive content with the potential to become a hit.
In addition to TON, we will also promote other public chain ecosystems to attract new users from other chains to participate in our ecosystem. In addition, the project parties of our weekly launchpool will also provide us with new users.
7. ChainCatcher: Do you think the trend of Telegram mini-games has passed? What do you think about the future of Telegram’s gaming ecosystem? Especially since the market value of many Telegram game tokens is difficult to exceed the valuation after they are launched?
Ricky Wong: From our perspective, the popularity of Telegram and TON ecosystem is increasing. We have been to Dubai, Singapore, Bangkok and other places to communicate with local project owners. They are very enthusiastic about entering the Telegram and TON ecosystem through us. Catizen can help them lower the threshold to enter the ecosystem.
In addition, as mentioned earlier, judging from Catizen’s on-chain users, the conversion rate of Telegram’s 1 billion users from on-chain to off-chain is still very low, and there is huge room for development.
The market value of many Telegram game tokens is difficult to exceed the valuation after they are launched. This is because games have a life cycle, especially small games. Many project teams did not think clearly about the sustainability issue at the beginning and did not figure out how to surprise the community.
But as a distribution platform, we have been thinking about how to output continuous popular content after Catizen, and how to seek more new users in more public chain ecosystems.
8. ChainCatcher: What are your feelings and gains from participating in the Bangkok Devcon Week?
Ricky Wong: Although I didn't attend the in-depth Devcon conference, I communicated a lot with some project parties and local compliant exchanges. One feeling is that the Crypto atmosphere in Bangkok is much stronger than I imagined. This is a region with great potential for the development of Crypto.
9. ChainCatcher: How do you evaluate the industry rankings selected by Rootdata?
Ricky Wong: The Crypto market has always had concerns and doubts about the various operators or conspiracy groups behind the projects. I think the Crypto market really needs more and more credible, transparent reports and industry lists to provide a reference for the market. When the credibility of such lists is gradually recognized, they will gradually be recognized by more and more market participants like a snowball.
