April Fools' Day, 2025
Yeah, April 1st. We know how it sounds.
I (Paul) was at the gym with Albert, bending irons and talking rubbish like you do between sets. The conversation drifted to Web3. I'd been working in the space for a few years by then. Binance Angel, deep in the ecosystem. And the one thing that kept frustrating me was how lifeless Web3 metaverses were. Cool concept, zero action. You'd walk into these "virtual worlds" and there was genuinely nothing to do.
Albert had been developing games for 10 years at that point. He's the kind of guy who'll stay up until 4am tweaking a reload animation because the ejected casing didn't spin right. Obsessed is an understatement. He'd worked at game dev studios, then started his own architectural visualization company, AJ Studios, but the man's heart was always in making games that were actually fun to play.
So between reps, I asked him a simple question: "How long would it take to build a game like this, and what would it cost?"
He gave me real numbers. Not fantasy. Not "if everything goes perfectly." Actual, grounded estimates from someone who'd shipped games before.
I went home and made the first pitch deck the next day.
The Idea That Wouldn't Leave
The core concept was dead simple: add real stakes to your gameplay.
I grew up on Call of Duty LAN parties. You'd drop a 40-kill streak on your mates and the only reward was bragging rights and maybe someone smashing a keyboard with keys flying all over the place. The enjoyment was real but there was nothing tangible to show for it. I always liked the idea of monetizing what you love. And it being fair. Not pay-to-win. Not whoever buys the best skin gets an advantage. Pure skill, real rewards.
That's what VS Protocol was from day one. Not a crypto project that happens to have a game. A game that happens to use crypto because it makes the experience better.
We spent the next few months thinking it through, building slowly, getting the foundation right. And then the opportunity came to prove it wasn't just talk.
23 Days. One Baby. Zero Sleep.
We signed up for the Colosseum Cypherpunk Hackathon, Solana's big one. Submissions closed October 30th. We basically had 23 days to turn our concept into something playable.
To say it was intense would be generous. There was almost no sleep. And this part still amazes me: Albert's wife gave birth to their first baby during the sprint. The man became a father and was still shipping code. I genuinely don't know how he did it.
By the deadline, we had a working game. Players could shoot each other, mine crypto from crystal deposits on the map, and had to survive long enough to extract with what they'd mined. Was it perfect? No. Sometimes the players' guns disappeared mid-match. But the core loop was there, and it worked.
We entered the Cape Town local bounty and placed 3rd. Here's the video of the announcement.
We didn't make the accelerator. That stung. But the feedback from the community was something else entirely. People loved how smooth it felt. They loved the different look. They got excited about the concept in a way that told us this wasn't just our delusion. There was real appetite for this.
Why No Token?
People ask us this constantly. Every Web3 game launches a token. We deliberately chose not to. Here's why:
When there's a token tied to a game, the perception of the game lives and dies with the token price. Token dumps 40%? Suddenly people think the game is failing, even if the gameplay is the best it's ever been. It takes the fun out of the whole thing.
And honestly, why would we create our own token when there are already perfectly good ones out there? You can play VS Protocol with Bitcoin, Solana, stablecoins. That's the whole point of crypto. Use what already exists. We're building a game, not a financial instrument.
Where This Is Going
I'll tell you what I actually see when I close my eyes and think about where VS Protocol lands.
I see esports events where exchanges have their own sponsored teams competing in extraction tournaments. I see streamers walking away from a single session with 10,000 USDT because they outplayed everyone in the lobby. I see new planets launching with interplanetary warfare. Entire ecosystems built around skill and survival.
But before all of that, I see the thing that matters most: someone loading into VS Protocol for the first time, looking around, and thinking: "Wow, I'm liking this a lot. Where's my friend so I can take his money?"
That's the feeling we're building for. Everything else follows from that.
We're Just Getting Started
VS Protocol was born on April Fools' Day between gym sets. It survived a 23-day hackathon, a newborn baby, disappearing guns, and more sleepless nights than either of us can count.
We're two humans from South Africa building a real project with personality. No VC board telling us to pivot. No token holders screaming about charts. Just a game-first shooter where skill actually pays. built by people who genuinely love playing games.
If that sounds like your kind of thing, come find us on Discord. We're not hard to reach. We're probably still at the gym.
// PAUL & ALBERT, CO-FOUNDERS