Author: Ru7, Tian Daxia Donny
In his 26 years of life, he has crossed many fields. He calls himself an "explorer", but he is always looking for the real storm beneath the calm sea.
He is better known for the project Sonic, which he led and the team that won US$16 million in funding.
He is Chris Zhu, founder and CEO of Mirror World. Sonic, owned by Mirror World, is the first atomic and interoperable SVM Layer 2 project in the Solana ecosystem. It is still leading technological innovation and aims to realize a sovereign gaming economy that will eventually be settled on Solana.
Today, let’s talk about Chris’ story - from the initial exploration to today’s achievements, and learn how this young founder opened up new channels in the ever-changing Web3 field.
Chris Zhu
Entering the circle: a "turning point"
Before entering the Web3 circle, Chris was passionate about culture and fashion. When he was a student, he interned in many top fashion companies, laying the first cornerstone for his future career.
After returning to China, he worked for Bilibili, Deloitte, and a US venture capital company for a while. However, it was his experience at ByteDance that really made Chris re-examine his career path. After joining ByteDance's strategic investment team, he quickly realized that he lacked passion for projects that were repeatedly packaged and redefined.
Many things seem to be new, but in essence they are just renovations of past theories. He frankly said that those technologies that were originally exciting can actually be attributed to "repetition of the known."
He gradually realized that what he really wanted was a boundless exploration, rather than wandering around relying on path dependence.
This reflection prompted him to turn his attention to Web3 and AI.
In 2021, he joined rct AI, a company exploring the combination of AI and blockchain. That year, amid the NFT craze, he led the team to create a unique NFT series, Mirror World, which generated $1.3 million in revenue in just 45 days. Later, Mirror World became the name of their company.
The success of the NFT project inspired him to explore broader possibilities, and he began to think about how to use blockchain technology to create a truly interconnected world. This thinking led him to the Solana chain, and he chose to further expand the ecological map of Mirror World on this chain.
At first, they considered many directions, including Polygon, StarkWare, Arbitrum, etc., but in the end he chose Solana because in his opinion, Solana is not only a public chain with excellent technical performance, but also a digital city-state that can support the explosion of large-scale financial applications.
In early 2022, Chris's team decided to seek seed round financing for the project. With the outstanding performance of early products and the team's foresight, they quickly attracted the attention of capital, and some well-known investment institutions extended olive branches to them. Subsequently, in the Pre-A round of financing, Chris and his team successfully raised $4 million, injecting important impetus into the development of the project.
The company almost collapsed
Originally they thought it would be a good start, but the collapse of FTX that year had a chain reaction on them.
“We raised about $4 million at the time, of which about $1.2 million was deposited in FTX, plus some funds paid to partners. At the time, we did not expect that the collapse of FTX would trigger a chain reaction later.”
Because by the second half of 2022, the Mirror World team had rapidly expanded to 29 people. The sudden collapse of FTX almost caught the team off guard and they were unable to withdraw funds. That night, the team held an emergency meeting and had to lay off half of the employees, reducing the staff size to thirteen or fourteen people.
After the FTX incident, the number of Mirror World’s customers dropped sharply. In the past, their customers were mainly some game projects on Solana, helping them to issue assets, but the impact of FTX has put the team at an unprecedented low.
In the absence of external energy injection, the industry became increasingly difficult to operate, and the pressure of increasing entropy almost suffocated the Mirror World team.
“At the beginning of 2024, our operating funds were almost at the bottom, and we had less than two months left to survive. At this time, the options we faced included finding a team to merge with.
We considered the possibility of selling it, but the negotiations did not go well. We finally decided to focus on the development of Sonic. "
Chris Zhu
Team: Challenges and breakthroughs in leveraging Eastern and Western cultures on Solana
Finally, in March 2024, Mirror World announced that it would launch the Sonic public gaming chain based on SVM HyperGrid on Solana. Mirror World stated that Sonic is the first Gaming Chain on Solana and proposed the first expansion architecture HyperGrid, which can help game developers efficiently process and manage game status, logic and events.
In this conversation, Chris shared the team’s development journey at Solana, the complexities they faced, and how he views the collaborative relationship between team members.
“By building a game chain on Solana, we see an opportunity to bring users and diversity to the ecosystem. Although some types of blockchain games have been proven to fail in the market, games centered on users and traffic can still bring in new users and drive industry development,” he explained.
The team insisted on going against the wind in the Web3 game track. Seeing fewer and fewer peers survive became the motivation for Chris' team to move forward. Coupled with the acceptance of RON and IMX in the Ethereum ecosystem by retail investors, Sonic's popularity doubled and gradually became Solana, which also made them gradually become one of the fastest growing teams in the Solana ecosystem.
Sonic official website https://www.sonic.game/
Chris believes that the team's diverse background also adds a lot of points to the project. The team has both deep Asian resources and an international perspective. Whether it is the marketing director who is of American descent but was born in Korea, or the CTO who grew up in Uganda, they are adept at cross-regional resource integration.
Ultimately, this diverse background, combined with the team members’ deep understanding and firm belief in the blockchain ecosystem, has led to the current trajectory of the project.
When talking about the division of labor within the core team, Chris used this metaphor.
“My role is like a network that captures all kinds of information and connections in the industry. I am responsible for breadth and make sure we understand every important direction.”
He then added: "For example, our product partner Jialin is like a sword. When I capture enough information, Jialin can help us quickly find a breakthrough and focus on a clear solution. When we work together, I spread out first, capture valuable information, and then quickly close the net, and Jialin then breaks through with the posture of a 'sword'."
Jonathan, another core member of the team, was described by Chris as a "bodyguard."
"He is like a city wall, solid and resilient. Jonathan is from Uganda and studied in the United States and China. He has not returned home for four or five years during the epidemic and has persisted in Beijing alone," Chris described.
Jonathan is responsible for solving the most difficult technical problems. He is the backbone of the team and the firm force that protects the team's progress.
Introduction to team members, picture from: Rootdata
Chris revealed that they experienced a life-or-death test in March this year. Every morning he would ask himself: "Should I give up?"
But the answer is always no, because he doesn't want to lose yet.
So Chris and his team decided to face the challenge and look for a new round of financing. However, the road was not smooth. They were constantly rejected, and almost every meeting made them anxious and uneasy.
Later, they met Mr. Cao Darong (former General Manager of Lightspeed Venture Partners) of Sky9 Capital, who not only became the main supporter of this round of financing, but also brought more high-quality investors to the team. The injection of this capital made the team feel relieved. It was not only a recognition of their early efforts, but also an important bet with confidence in future development.
On June 18, 2024, Sonic announced the completion of a US$12 million Series A financing round, led by Bitkraft Ventures, and followed by OKX Ventures, Mirana Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Sanctor Capital, Yunjiu Capital, Matt Sorg and others. The valuation of this round of financing reached US$100 million.
In this round of financing, Galaxy Interactive participated again after the previous round of investment. As one of the largest compliance service providers in the Solana ecosystem, Galaxy Interactive also served as an important intermediary for FTX OTC. This support gave the team stronger market endorsement. The investors also included several important angel investors within the Solana ecosystem, further demonstrating their trust and recognition of Sonic.
Image from: Rootdata
The completion of this round of financing marks a new stage in Sonic's growth and makes Chris and his team more confident about future development.
Chris said that the team will use this funding to further improve Sonic's technical architecture and accelerate its application expansion in the Web3 and Solana ecosystems. At the same time, Chris also emphasized Sonic's goal - to become an important part of promoting the development of SVM Layer 2, achieve blockchain interoperability, and empower more developers and users.
Chris mentioned that their team is opening up new paths, such as using TikTok as a traffic platform to guide more users into the world of cryptocurrency through this innovative approach.
Not for success but for exploration
On the road to entrepreneurship, everyone will meet some key figures, whose influence often changes our life trajectory invisibly. For this young entrepreneur, it was two special people who first introduced him to the blockchain industry.
The first one was his roommate in his freshman year of college, a very creative friend. This friend made a bold move in mid-2021 - he bought a painting by street artist Banksy, burned it himself, and then converted this behavior into NFT for marketing. This was not only a collision of art and technology, but also allowed him to get in touch with the world of blockchain.
The second person who had a profound influence on him was another close friend, who was one of the founders of Injective Protocol. The success of Injective Protocol made him see the huge potential of the blockchain industry and inspired him to explore and participate in this industry.
Looking back at his student days, he mined with his friends in the dormitory. The overheated power supply caused the temperature of the entire room to rise sharply. This seemingly inadvertent experience laid the groundwork for his later entrepreneurial journey.
Today, as a young entrepreneur, his work pace can be described as “busy”.
He recalled: "In the past two years, I have hardly lived in one place for more than three or four weeks. Whether at home or abroad, my time is almost entirely spent on attending meetings, communicating, traveling, and other work."
Although this busy lifestyle has enabled him to accumulate a lot of business experience, it has also made him realize that such running around is not only a drain on his physical strength and energy, but also an invisible challenge to his time and quality of life. Therefore, in the next stage, he wants to stay sober and focused.
At the age of 26, I am standing on the wave of Web3, staying awake and focused
Looking to the future, he is full of confidence in the development of the company and the industry.
"We are now at a very important turning point. In the next three to five years, we hope to be able to compete with the world's top projects and make world-class achievements that are truly ours."
He has very clear goals for the future, especially in the areas of capacity expansion solutions and Layer 2, where he hopes to promote more efficient and innovative technological solutions.
He is not afraid of future competition. On the contrary, he pays more attention to how to gain market share through product user experience and innovative business models.
“Our current advantage is that we are deeply involved in the Solana ecosystem, and there is no gap in leading projects in the Layer 2 field, which provides us with huge room for development.”
"My father was not a person who particularly supported me in starting a business, especially after I left the financial industry and the big companies. His attitude always made me feel very stressed. For him, traditional industries are stable and reliable, while starting a business is full of uncertainty and may even lead to failure."
But during this period of conflicting emotions, Chris gradually realized that his concerns were not unreasonable. After all, his worldview was different from the innovative spirit I pursued. He represented a stable tradition, while I was eager to break through these rigid ideas and create a brand new world. Although I understood him, this contradiction and struggle made me more determined to break through my own limitations.
Chris knows that in this noisy industry, it is crucial to stay sober and focused. In a fast-growing track like the crypto industry, in addition to innovation and passion, calm judgment and clear strategy are also the key to success.
“In today’s crypto industry, the values of assets, payments, and transactions coexist. In the future, we will see that any industry can bring huge value through financialization. This requires us to be clear about what problems we want to solve while constantly innovating, rather than just pursuing short-term market popularity.”
Standing at the forefront of Web3, Chris deeply understands that the road to innovation is not easy, and there are many difficulties and challenges ahead, but he always believes that only by staying sober, focused and innovative can he find his own direction in the turbulent industry waves.
