2024Product ManagerLive

Chess Universe

Web3 product strategy for a 10M-player chess game. Migrated chains, ran a sale, kept the game playable throughout.

Problem

Chess Universe had an existing NFT footprint on Polygon and a player base that mostly wasn't crypto-native. Polygon's economics no longer fit the product. The challenge was to migrate to Immutable zkEVM without breaking ownership, hold a successful sale on the new chain, and keep onboarding frictionless for non-crypto players.

Approach

Treat it as three coordinated workstreams: a clean migration plan with stakeholder alignment across Kalmia, Chess Universe, and Immutable; a Passport-authenticated onboarding flow that hid the wallet behind familiar mechanics; and an NFT sale on the new chain to validate that the migration translated into real on-chain demand.

Decisions

01
Define the product vision for NFTs, tokenised assets, and Web3 progression first
Before touching contracts, wrote down what NFTs meant for the player journey: cosmetic, progression, or speculative. Made downstream tradeoffs (sale design, gas economics, tutorial copy) easy to call.
02
Full Polygon → Immutable zkEVM migration over partial bridging
A clean cut to Immutable was simpler to communicate to holders and avoided ongoing two-chain complexity. The zkEVM economics were better aligned with the game's frequency of small transactions.
03
Passport authentication baked into onboarding
Most Chess Universe players don't care about wallets. Passport let them create one transparently and turned a multi-step Web3 onboarding into something close to a normal game login.
04
Three-way stakeholder alignment with Kalmia, Chess Universe, and Immutable
A migration that touches a third-party game studio and a third-party chain only ships if all three sides have written-down owners and decision logs. Spent the up-front time on RACI so the engineering work was unblocked.