Moonshot Mafia #06 | Curio Research: The Sandbox of Civilization and the Experiment of Society
Curio Research is a group of creatives focusing on building games that create rich and expansive social interactions through the composability of crypto and the power of smart contracts.
Games can bring people together in ways impossible in the real world, creating bonds that last a lifetime. Beyond that, Curio’s first on-chain strategy game will let players create new nations, new governance structures, and new ways to live in their utopian nations.
Curio is supported by the best investors, including Bain Capital Crypto, TCG, industry leaders from Coinbase, Niantic, Compound Finance, Gauntlet, etc.
A good game is often used to convey the creator’s thoughts on philosophy, humanity, society, and life. Fully on-chain gaming is slowly becoming one of the mainstream domains in the crypto world. Curio tries to build a sandbox of civilization by using fully on-chain games as a medium to convey their thoughts on the real-world system and transcend the existing order and values. This approach allows for more forms of interaction between people, and the creation of political experiments that are impossible to achieve in the real world. Today, Curio, which was founded only six months ago, has already received more than 3 million dollars of investment from top-tier funds such as Bain Capital and TCG Crypto.
At Moonshot Commons’ Web3 Fireside Chat #6, we had a great conversation with Kevin, the co-founder of Curio and an old friend in the Moonshot Founders community, about his past experiences, the process of founding Curio, and his thoughts on the world.
Although you are the co-founder of Curio, you rarely refer to yourself as an entrepreneur or programmer. On the contrary, you often share your academic interests such as philosophy and literature with the public. How did you develop these academic interests and how do you see these disciplines shape your perspective?
I first became interested in entrepreneurship when I went to Penn’s summer school in my junior year of high school. There, I was exposed to some knowledge of technology and business. At Yale, I initially wanted to study CS and electrical engineering, but then I thought I should explore something in college that I wouldn’t be able to study later, so I turned to philosophy, literature, and religious studies, foregoing CS classes for a while.
In fact, I was very interested in the humanities before I started my business. Even before attending Yale, I started to explore books on sociology and psychology, thinking that they would be useful for understanding the formation and development of society.
This is why I chose to major in philosophy during college. But after I learned philosophy, I realized it is quite close to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). The first class for any philosophy major is Logic 101, which teaches you how to construct a statement of opinion. When I started to take Analytical Philosophy, I felt that the logic I learned was similar to that of science and technology, so I started to explore some areas that were unfamiliar to broaden myself. For example, I took a class called The Bible, which was about reading and studying the Old Testament. At the same time, I am slowly becoming more oriented toward literary studies, especially Russian literature.
I would like to explore anything that encompasses human nature. I think literature can help me understand human nature better. In a way, literature is applied philosophy. Unlike studying systematic philosophical theories, readers can explore a lot of things that have a lot of intrinsic value from literature by brewing themselves. I think these observations and experiences from literature can become guidelines for coping with people in society, which will be more useful in the long run than the more practical CS.
Curio Team Discussion. Source: Curio.
How did this social research approach and attitude carry over to your startup project?
The name of our company is Curio Research I always thought it would be cool to add “research” to the name of the company — it’s a good way to express the nature and norm of our company, which is on-chain gaming, a subject that requires a lot of research.
At the moment, on-chain gaming doesn’t have a huge market, to be honest. Although a lot of people are interested in this field, it has not gained much recognition in the industry. A lot of what people are doing is more on the R&D (Research and Development) side. The process is usually as such: iterating a product, testing the product, getting feedback, fixing the product based on feedback, and repeating the process until the final version.
Most of what we do is not readily available in the playbook for business development.
For example, if I do a Defi project, to some extent, there is a process that I can follow: first, build a product; next, write a whitepaper; then, find a market maker; and finalize it on a platform like Binance or Coinbase. These are all successful examples in Defi, which are not available in on-chain gaming. So we have to do a lot of research on how to follow these steps, how to launch, how to do the UI, and so on.
The four members of our team are all very interested in human history and we read together very often. For example, we are all reading a book about Deng Xiaoping recently. We all think that on-chain gaming is very similar to building a civilization. Since we will definitely be involved in the design of DAO in the future, understanding human history is a vital part of our company’s development. Some of this is reflected in the codebase we wrote. For instance, many of the tests we wrote are named after real events that happened in history, and there is a setting in the game called NATO(The North Atlantic Treaty Organization).
I think what we’re doing is like building a sandbox for civilization. Our main goal is to create a platform where people can conduct various interesting social experiments. In many ways, I think the word “game” doesn’t quite capture what we’re doing. You could say DAO is like a game, or DeFi is like a game, but there is certainly more to it. Our team’s perspective on this project is mostly centered around human history.
Game Prototype Built on Our Fully On-Chain Engine. Source: Curio.
“Observations are not based on one or two human behaviors, but on the sensitivity to social behavior, reflecting on every subtle point of interaction.”
Although you didn’t choose the tech path in college, you have been exploring business or product development, such as founding Opus Studio at Yale. What was the reason for starting this project in college?
Opus Studio started rather coincidentally and was influenced by MSCHF, who were particularly interested in making very strange but viral products. Many of their products had a very high ROI (return on investment). Although they didn’t spend a lot of time making them, their popularity spread very fast on the internet and was featured in various magazines.
I was actually trying to figure out how to make a product that goes viral easily, and college is a very good place to do that because you can reach a large group of users directly. Generally, all the students’ email addresses are public, so you can directly push your product to the eyes of thousands of people. And I feel that young people will be more willing to try all kinds of things. When they hear that it is a product made by other college students, I think most people are willing to try it.
We made three products during college. Probably the most interesting one was a dating app we made on Valentine’s Day in 2021, called Ship. At that time, I was working with another partner in China. He wrote it while I was asleep, and I would get up and continue to write the rest while he went to bed. It was a very efficient non-stop cycle, and we finished coding the app in three days.
The software was very successful at that time. Other schools had done some similar projects, but we felt that those were rather boring and very similar. Usually, dating app systems match two people together, but we wanted to make a dating app where friends could help a user find a match, and the user could do the same thing for their friends. You could put one of your friends and another person on a ship in the app and send them to the sea. Then, they would be notified by an anonymous message. We also made a global leaderboard, where users can see the ranking of all the ships. For example, many people think A and B are good matches and can vote for them. We released the software on Valentine’s Day. The entire school had more than 6000 undergraduates, and more than 4000 people registered in one day.
Through this project, I found that in order to make a product viral, we must be sensitive to human social behavior and be able to capture very subtle details in human interaction. I think having many specific functions in the app was very beneficial to enhance users’ experience, making it easier to spread among friend groups. For instance, there was a global leaderboard that I mentioned earlier, where you could see the ranking of all the couples and anyone could vote for them. This setup turned what was a more personal dating behavior into a social one, almost like an anonymous contest for more people to participate in. We also tried to make it look nice and easy to share so that people would be urged to take pictures and post them on social media. We even paid attention to the smallest details, such as the wording of the emails we sent. It’s one of these customer engagement opportunities that keep users wanting to interact with the surrounding community through this software.
We even built a very comprehensive and flexible data analysis system on our own at that time. I think this kind of experience optimization is very important for user-oriented products. In fact, in crypto, there are many mechanisms like tokens, and there are probably more ways to make a product viral. We have recently been exploring how to achieve this goal in a crypto-native way.
We can see some of the products already trying this, such as STEPN. I really like STEPN. Their UX is very well done and they do many things that other crypto products don’t dare to do, but make sense in Web2. For example, when you buy their shoes, they will set the price to USD and then adjust the SOL (cryptocurrency) value from there. Because they know that most users don’t think in terms of SOL when they buy, they think in terms of USD. SOL prices change every day, and USD prices stay the same. This is a very reasonable touch point for user experience, I think, but few Web3 products would think about it or dare to do it.
Note: read more about STEPN’s product design philosophy in our Moonshot Mafia #01 with its founder Jerry.
What did you capture from the social aspect of Curio and on-chain gaming that other projects hadn’t noticed?
I don’t think Curio was based on one or two observations of human behavior. It was based on longer-term observations.
I was working on product design for an NFT marketplace for a while, and then I was also working on DID, but I didn’t find the two particularly interesting. I think DID is very important, but it was too early for that time. Its logical narrative had not yet been perfected. So I went back to school and started exploring more about DeFi and gaming.
I was also very fortunate to be invited by the Dark Forest development team to MIT to participate in their conference. They had a hacker house, and the people there is probably the most talented group of young people I’ve ever met in crypto. Both people from humanities and CS backgrounds were very down to earth and wrote code to build their products, very different from many Web3 communities I’ve come across on Twitter before. I thought this group of people was very cool which inspired me to study on-chain gaming more seriously after this experience.
Through my research, I found that on-chain gaming is still lacking composability. Although this word has become a buzzword in crypto, there is no on-chain game that can really do this, including Dark Forest. Dark Forest is really cool mainly because the front end is open source and you can write your own plugins to make the game more powerful. Yet, it’s not a very Web3 game since they are implementing it entirely in Web2. While DFDao is also using a fork (A fork happens whenever a community makes a change to the blockchain’s protocol or basic set of rules) to allow you to write backends. I don’t think those are really composable.
The real composability is to let you write something interesting in a smart contract, like a liquidity management program on Uniswap. A lot of our initial thinking in building Curio revolves around how to improve composability. We explored several things to get to that point, many of which were quite basic. For example, I thought there was a problem with Dark Forest: their chains were cluttered and their data structures changed frequently. If I wanted to write a plugin to be used in the first round, I would find it useless in the second round because the data structure had changed. And their codebase uses a lot of ZK (zero-knowledge technology, a blanket term for protocols and services using an encryption method called zero-knowledge), which is cool but makes it less composable. After all, few people would choose to spend 10 to 20 hours understanding ZK before they start writing plugins.
I think two changes could be implemented to solve this problem.
First, we needed to think about how to make the data structure of the fully on-chain game more uniform, so we spent a lot of time making our own on-chain game engine. This is really about making a data structure that doesn’t change from game to game. For instance, the data structure of our Curio base is the same now as it will be in the next round, and the plugins that are written to work now will work in the next round. This will be a very important factor for developers, otherwise, they wouldn’t use your data structure to write plugins.
Second, the possibilities for composability are so broad that sometimes you need to give developers some specific guidance on how to write within a scope. In our game, there are treatises, which are actually social contracts. For example, if my country fights with your country, we might write a contract like NATO. That’s a very specific scope and purpose so that the player/developer will know what they need to do with composability. We’ll also provide a lot of templates that players can use without writing code to change the name and some parameters directly. Such resources will allow a lot of people with little development experience to participate.
Treaty V0 Contract. Source: Curio.
“Freedom within established rules can inspire more possibilities.”
What was your perception of the crypto space at the time, and how did that perspective develop?
At first, I heard the word NFT in 2019. When I was in college, I didn’t fully understand its meaning. I thought it was a very strange concept, and I didn’t look at the technical aspects behind it.
Then about the beginning of 2021, NFT began to be very hot, and many platforms received a lot of investment. Since there was a lot of technology-related news on Twitter, I started to scroll Twitter and began to re-examine these fields again.
I’ve always been interested in art and art history, so I learned from the idea of appreciating art. I messaged the founder of SuperRare directly to learn more about NFT from him. I had always wanted to do product design, and I had worked on many other startups before. He was also looking for product designers, so I joined them and worked there part-time.
Although I had worked with crypto companies before, I hadn’t paid much attention to smart contract concepts and wasn’t particularly interested in coding. I also tried to take some relevant courses in college, but they didn’t feel very useful until I came across solidity and EVM later. I think I found my passion for computer science in the crypto world. Later, I started to read NFT contracts and Uniswap compounds, and I was attracted to them from a technical point of view. When I was looking for an internship, I found a similar startup, doing front-end work and learning about Rust (Rust, Graydon Hoare’s creation, is the famous language for creating fast and secure applications).
I am a relatively application-driven person. If you show me a topic, you must be able to make me understand how useful it is to get my interest. Before, if I simply learned data structure, it may only be useful if I want to work in a large firm. I may not see the use of something more fundamental, such as systems, so I won’t want to learn it. However, now the research in crypto is getting deeper and deeper. For example, now I do on-chain games, so I will study the cosmos. I would need to read the consensus algorithm articles, or how they build WebAssembly at the bottom of these things. This is the motivation for my new research on CS. If I want to study EVM, I have to know what VM is. I didn’t really know much about it before. I learned it from YouTube videos and articles at the time. Now I want to go back to school and take some classes that teach you how to make a registry-based machine for a semester so that I can better understand EVM and Solidity. I think when I write code, I need to be driven by such an applicable goal. Otherwise, it would be meaningless to me.
Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Source: ethereum.org.
How have the governance and social aspects become more of a focus for you in crypto?
Actually, it was a lot of random events, like seeing Constitutional DAO and making capital formation more effective in the form of a DAO. I also saw many different forms of governance.
I found that the on-chain game itself is very close to governance. In a way, video games contain the real world. Thinking about it from a governance perspective: if I test a new governance model, I can implement it better in a virtual game than in the real world, because you have a video game premise. The video game itself is an excuse that allows you to do a lot of things you want to do, including different governance approaches through a lot of DeFi Protocol. DeFi Protocol has real assets that can do weird things in the name of the game.
I found that in the game you can do a lot of political experiments that are not possible in reality. For example, you can’t change the political model every second, from direct democracy to delegated democracy, but you can do it in the game with DeFi Protocol. You can even make this a game model, changing the governance model every two weeks. Let’s say every two weeks you let the community vote to change the governance model. A lot of these experiments that would not make sense in other contexts can be implemented within the game system.
A lot of these ideas came to me when I was talking to my friends. I knew many people in school who were interested in political science, and a friend in crypto specialized in constitutional law. We often discussed some political science issues, and he would tell me that this was related to DAO. You can’t deduce which governance model is better entirely through theory. You have to actually test them.
There are a lot of things outside of the crypto mainstream narrative that I’d like to explore, but I don’t have enough time. It makes me dizzy to read too much of the mainstream narrative on Twitter right now, and it probably makes more sense when I look at a lot of projects outside of that. The founder of Compound protocol gave a talk to a lot of people in the crypto community back in 2017. At the time, many people did not take his concepts seriously, but in just 4 years they have been fully implemented.
For example, although it’s still all about Ethereum as the dominant narrative in crypto, I like Solana, because its ecosystem is very focused on providing compatibility. Although they know it will somehow lose some decentralization, they are willing to take that trade-off.
Curio Team Discussion. Source: Curio.
How did this idea of using video games as a testing ground for real politics gradually build up? What was your previous perception of the game?
I don’t have a strong background in political science, and a lot of my ideas came from talking to friends. I think this perspective is actually a very common one in traditional games, especially in MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online). I just think crypto can further enhance this perspective and make the game better simulate reality.
The concept of composability is very basic in the real world. For example, my hand can interact with an item. I can hold it, throw it, exchange it, and all these are like an API (Application Programming Interface). On-chain games are closer to real-world interactions in this way, and the freedom within a set of rules can stimulate more creativity and possibilities.
Also, crypto has many tools to facilitate this combination, such as tokens. To get developers to spend time on the game, you need to give them some basic guarantees. It would be attractive if this guarantee contained decentralized assets.
This kind of guarantee is not available in traditional games. I played a game called Team Fortress 2 before and slowly stopped playing it because they inflated the economy too much. Now it seems that the process is quite Web3-like. The main reason for inflation is that there was a trading site called TF backpack, just like CoinGecko, where you can check the value and transaction history of an item. Since they had ownership of the data they collected, they were able to mark up the value of items at will. As a result, the free market was disrupted. Many of the items that should’ve been valuable became worthless, and I was left with a lot of equipment that no one wanted to buy. I was also graduating middle school at the time, and I wanted to spend more time studying, so I got rid of all the equipment in high school and deleted the game.
If it is an on-chain game, this problem should not happen, as all the data is particularly transparent. This is very important. The recent data privacy problems in the crypto industry, such as the collapse of FTX, have all proved the importance of on-chain game development.
But in practice, we are actually facing a lot of trade-offs, and we are in such a state of exploration and criticism every day. For example, if we want to do it on EVM for a long time, we may be driven to make a simpler but more finance-based game, because it’s hard to make an MMO-level game without high TPS (Transactions Per Second). If we spend time making a side chain on Solana or Cosmos, it may make for a more interesting and different game in the long run although the technical cost is high in the short term. There is no right answer to any of these questions, but I actually have to make choices every day because things change so quickly in the crypto world. For example, dYdX’s decision to leave StarkWare for Cosmos, combined with the addition of USDC, immediately boosted a lot of people’s hopes for Cosmos. There are so many of these unpredictable events, but they usually directly change the face of the entire ecosystem. The only thing you can do is make this series of choices in real time around our original intent.
“Language is the meaning itself, an important vehicle for individuals to interact with nature or others, and the basis for people to generate community and value”
On your personal website, you call your previous experiences “past lives.” How do you view these previous experiences and your current state of life? What are the internal connections?
I think I do these things because I always think it’s very interesting for people to interact with each other and with society. A lot of the projects I’ve started myself are based on this starting point. When I was at Opus Studio, I wanted to make products that were ToC, and the game itself is one of the most social products. Nowadays, people chat and socialize in games, such as Roblox and Fortnite. In fact, I used to do product design because I wanted to do something that could directly shape the user’s experience, and so did governance, which was built from human social behavior itself.
My current life chapter is actually quite strange. Although I am out here doing entrepreneurship, I still feel like I am in college. My partner and I are living with a group of friends, and we are all starting our own businesses, some doing NFT, some doing AI, and some doing VC. Our friends in San Francisco actually feel like we are in a frat every day. And next year, many of our friends will graduate and all come to San Francisco, so we may have a feeling of being in college all the time. I will increasingly feel that hanging out with friends for quality time is the highest priority in life.
At the same time, I actually feel like I’m getting a little old. I saw these people from classes of 2026 and 2027 when I went back to school the past two weeks, and they all looked so young. They were all probably already in contact with crypto from their freshman year, which is totally unimaginable to me.
I see that your personal website also has a column called “writing.” Although there is no content in it for now, how did your desire for writing come about? What does writing mean to you?
I write very rarely, to be honest. Writing is still quite time-consuming, but if I had the time, I would especially like to try to write some fiction. I took a class at school called Daily Themes, which means you write a few hundred words a day, regardless of how well you write, but you have to write every day. After this class, I felt that I had a new understanding of writing because I usually read a lot of literature. Sometimes I feel that it is a meaningless act, and I keep inputting without outputting, which does not contribute anything to myself and society. But if I can have a written record like this, you can look back after a few years on what I was thinking about those things and what my opinion was. After many years you have a logbook of your own thinking. I sometimes write a logbook, but not every day, only when I feel the need to write, usually when I am not very happy, as a way to express myself.
Words are very important, in a way language is meaning itself, and it is an essential vehicle for personal consciousness to interact with nature or others. Expressing oneself through language is a very basic human behavior, on top of which people can form a society and generate values.
