6 Questions for Simon Davis of Mighty Bear Games

Published

2 years ago

July 28, 2023

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Simon Davis is the co-founder and CEO of Mighty Bear Games, a multiplatform game developer in Southeast Asia creating accessible multiplayer experiences in Web3.

Davis has spent almost two decades working in the gaming industry, but he never planned to actually work in this field.

Before crypto, he was a professional guitarist who made ends meet by playing in metal bands and cover bands and by teaching guitar. But after his money dried up one summer, he scored a six-week gig as a professional game tester — and he’s never looked back.

Mighty Bear Games' Simon Davis' guitar collection — *Davis’ ever-growing guitar collection. (Simon Davis)*

During his time in the gaming industry, Davis has held management and product lead positions at gaming companies including King Digital Entertainment, Ubisoft, Bigpoint, AKQA, Empire Interactive, and Laughing Jackal.

In 2017, Davis teamed up with some friends and fellow industry veterans to launch Mighty Bear Games in Singapore, where they intended to focus on creating traditional games — before pivoting to blockchain in 2022. And in 2023, the firm launched an open beta for Mighty Action Heroes, its first Web3 gaming title.

Davis, who also goes by “Papa Bear,” said every Mighty Bear employee receives a “bear title.” Some of Papa Bear’s employees include “Arty Bear,” “Bear-Abel,” “Excel Bear,” and “Bear McNumbers.”

Why the pivot to blockchain gaming?

I was lucky enough to kind of get into Bitcoin by accident in 2015, so I’ve been in the space for a few years. In 2021, I started playing with NFTs, and I’m lucky enough to be also based in Southeast Asia, so I could see firsthand what was happening with Axie [Infinity]. I think, for me, as someone who lived through the transition to free-to-play, it felt very much like a moment, kind of like when Farmville came out on Facebook.

I think that for live service titles [games like Fortnite, League of Legends and Apex Legends], a dominant business model is going to emerge to revolve around player-owned and operated economies. Because I don’t believe you can have virtual worlds without digital property rights, essentially.

And I think that does enable a lot of new things that we’re really starting to scratch the surface on. So, I think that really was the pull factor.

What format do you think serves as the best way to attract users to blockchain gaming?

*The Mighty Bear Games team. (Simon Davis)*

I think mobile gaming is going to be the dominant platform because of geography. You see this if you look at the charts for the countries that have a great slope of interest in crypto or Web3. They tend to be countries where existing payment rails are not super developed.

People are largely unbanked in places like Indonesia and Brazil. These markets are mobile-first. Like, people in the Philippines and India are not necessarily using high-end PCs.

So, you need to go where the users are. And this is a bit of a spicy take, but this is why I’m very bearish on people making super HD high-end Web3 games because it’s just not where the markets are today. So, you see a lot of these teams raising, like, mega bucks to make console-quality titles, but if no one can play them, then they aren’t going to do very much.

What do you think the current hurdles are for large-scale blockchain gaming adoption?

A lot of people talk about it in terms of silver bullets, right? Like, “Oh, we need one good game,” or like, “We need to solve the wallet problem.” I don’t think it’s any one of those things. I actually think it is just a lot of lead bullets, a lot of small things that need to happen.

What I’ve experienced today is still pretty terrible, and scary, like social recovery. And it’s starting to become a thing, but that needs to become a lot easier.

Do you think the bad rap blockchain/NFT gaming gets is a big issue?

It’s funny because gaming got a pretty bad rap in the 90s. You know, everyone was talking about how games were making children violent. There was a big moral panic, just like there was in music a few years before.

But I think that when you start to get these things in people’s hands and experience them, perceptions change. I do think a lot of the reputation that we have in crypto and Web3 is deserved. There are a lot of bad actors exploiting the lack of regulation, but the things that excite me: I’ve seen some games, for example, that allow players to earn small amounts of Bitcoin, And this sort of thing’s retention numbers are very strong, like the initial metrics are very promising. And I think that’s a really nice use case.

Reddit is also a great example, right? They put NFTs in the hands of huge numbers of people. A lot of people didn’t even realize they were interacting with NFTs. So then they had their first taste, and yeah — there are some stats that have come up, and not a huge amount of them have transacted on-chain.

But I actually don’t think that’s such a bad thing. If people are not dumping the assets on day one, I don’t see that as a negative. So, I think onboarding through stealth is pretty good.

What kind of adoption metrics are you looking for with your games?

So, people talk about installs and sign-ups — it’s just a vanity metric. For me, I’m interested in how many people are coming in every day, how regularly they’re coming back, and what the growth curve of that looks like initially.

And then once we do the mobile launch [of Mighty Action Heroes], which will be around August/September, how well are we doing on attracting non-crypto-native people into the game as well? That will be very interesting, and to see how they play together. It’s a different angle, but it’s one that I’m pretty bullish on.

What are some ideas or tech upgrades that could help blockchain gaming?

ERC-6551 tokens.

Essentially, they give a smart contract account or a smart contract wallet to a 721 [token]. So, you know, a traditional NFT would be a JPG with some metadata attached. But essentially, the JPG or the asset, whatever that is, is then bound to a smart contract.

And this is pretty cool because it means that assets can communicate directly with each other. So NFT to NFT, without using MetaMask. And it could also be compatible with other smart contract wallets.

I think the really cool thing is that, essentially, your asset becomes a wallet and can have its own logic as well. So you could have a base character in a game as the 6551 token, and then all the clothes or the items or everything that that character has, the kind of sub-assets, can change within, each with its own logic.

As a game developer, you start thinking of how your characters could evolve and how you can attach new assets without updating the core.

Then as a dev, I think it’s really good for reputation management as well. Like, if you did a soulbound version, you could have achievements, proof-of-work, proof-of-play, social identity. I think it’s pretty cool. […] It’s more secure because it’s not just an asset within a wallet like it is on smart contracts with its own private key.

Brian Quarmby

Brian Quarmby discovered crypto in 2013 and instantly fell in love with the idea of decentralization. Brian has since lived and worked Asia and returned to Melbourne in late 2019. Brian is a lover of sport and art and is bullish on the potential for NFTs to transform artists lives in the near future.

Politics

Regulators must catch up to the new privacy paradigm

Published

2 hours ago

November 9, 2025

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Regulators must catch up to the new privacy paradigm

Opinion by: Agata Ferreira, assistant professor at the Warsaw University of Technology

A new consensus is forming across the Web3 world. For years, privacy was treated as a compliance problem, liability for developers and at best, a niche concern. Now it is becoming clear that privacy is actually what digital freedom is built on.

The Ethereum Foundation’s announcement of the Privacy Cluster — a cross-team effort focused on private reads and writes, confidential identities and zero-knowledge proofs — is a sign of a philosophical redefinition of what trust, consensus and truth mean in the digital age and a more profound realization that privacy must be built into infrastructure.

Regulators should pay attention. Privacy-preserving designs are no longer just experimental; they are now a standard approach. They are becoming the way forward for decentralized systems. The question is whether law and regulation will adopt this shift or remain stuck in an outdated logic that equates visibility with safety.

From shared observation to shared verification

For a long time, digital governance has been built on a logic of visibility. Systems were trustworthy because they could be observed by regulators, auditors or the public. This “shared observation” model is behind everything from financial reporting to blockchain explorers. Transparency was the means of ensuring integrity.

In cryptographic systems, however, a more powerful paradigm is emerging: shared verification. Instead of every actor seeing everything, zero-knowledge proofs and privacy-preserving designs enable verifying that a rule was followed without revealing the underlying data. Truth becomes something you can prove, not something you must expose.

This shift might seem technical, but it has profound consequences. It means we no longer need to pick between privacy and accountability. Both can coexist, embedded directly into the systems we rely on. Regulators, too, must adapt to this logic rather than battle against it.

Privacy as infrastructure

The industry is realizing the same thing: Privacy is not a niche. It’s infrastructure. Without it, the Web3 openness becomes its weakness, and transparency collapses into surveillance.

Emerging architectures across ecosystems demonstrate that privacy and modularity are finally converging. Ethereum’s Privacy Cluster focuses on confidential computation and selective disclosure at the smart-contract level.

Others are going deeper, integrating privacy into the network consensus itself: sender-unlinkable messaging, validator anonymity, private proof-of-stake and self-healing data persistence. These designs are rebuilding the digital stack from the ground up, aligning privacy, verifiability and decentralization as mutually reinforcing properties.

This is not an incremental improvement. It is a new way of thinking about freedom in the digital network age.

Policy is lagging behind the technology

Current regulatory approaches still reflect the logic of shared observation. Privacy-preserving technologies are scrutinized or restricted, while visibility is mistaken for safety and compliance. Developers of privacy protocols face regulatory pressure, and policymakers continue to think that encryption is an obstacle to observability.

This perspective is outdated and dangerous. In a world where everyone is being watched, and where data is harvested on an unprecedented scale, bought, sold, leaked and exploited, the absence of privacy is the actual systemic risk. It undermines trust, puts people at risk and makes democracies weaker. By contrast, privacy-preserving designs make integrity provable and enable accountability without exposure.

Lawmakers must begin to view privacy as an ally, not an adversary — a tool for enforcing fundamental rights and restoring confidence in digital environments.

Stewardship, not just scrutiny

The next phase of digital regulation must move from scrutiny to support. Legal and policy frameworks should protect privacy-preserving open source systems as critical public goods. Stewardship stance is a duty, not a policy choice.

It means providing legal clarity for developers and distinguishing between acts and architecture. Laws should punish misconduct, not the existence of technologies that enable privacy. The right to maintain private digital communication, association and economic exchange must be treated as a fundamental right, enforced by both law and infrastructure.

Such an approach would demonstrate regulatory maturity, recognizing that resilient democracies and legitimate governance rely on privacy-preserving infrastructure.

The architecture of freedom

The Ethereum Foundation’s privacy initiative and other new privacy-first network designs share the idea that freedom in the digital age is an architectural principle. It cannot depend solely on promises of good governance or oversight; it must be built into protocols that shape our lives.

These new systems, private rollups, state-separated architectures and sovereign zones represent the practical synthesis of privacy and modularity. They enable communities to build independently while remaining verifiably connected, thereby combining autonomy with accountability.

Policymakers should view this as an opportunity to support the direct embedding of fundamental rights into the technical foundation of the internet. Privacy-by-design should be embraced as legality-by-design, a way to enforce fundamental rights through code, not just through constitutions, charters and conventions.

The blockchain industry is redefining what “consensus” and “truth” mean, replacing shared observation with shared verification, visibility with verifiability, and surveillance with sovereignty. As this new dawn for privacy takes shape, regulators face a choice: Limit it under the old frameworks of control, or support it as the foundation of digital freedom and a more resilient digital order.

The tech is getting ready. The laws need to catch up.

Opinion by: Agata Ferreira, assistant professor at the Warsaw University of Technology.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.