Web2 Products, Web3 Cashbacks — an Interview With Sarun Vichayabhai, Playbux Founder and CEO

Entertainment and innovation aren’t mutually exclusive. Going beyond the left-curve vs. right-curve binary, it’s possible to build fun and engaging solutions based on serious, cutting-edge work.

Playbux is an example in this context. I had the opportunity of chatting with its Founder and CEO, Sarun Viachayabhai. We discussed Web3’s role in shaping entertainment’s future, the importance of AI, how Playbux is putting all this to action, and lots more. Enjoy.

Hello, Sarun. Welcome. Please tell our readers a bit about your journey to begin.

Sure, it’s my pleasure.

I’ve traveled around the world ever since childhood. At 10 I moved to England and studied for a while there. Then I moved to New York around 1992 and joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. As I had skipped two years, I was the youngest freshman in my college.

The institute was big on computer science and they made us do many interesting projects around GUIs or Graphical User Interfaces and something like mock startups. This was around 1996—the very early days of Dot Com.

Startups weren’t really a thing either.

After this I moved back to Thailand and worked as an investment banker for two years. I left this industry when the 1997 Asian Financial crisis hit and eventually formed my first company.

It was a SaaS, fantasy football type of thing where we onboarded over a million users in the first year. But payment rails were complicated back then and we couldn’t monetize.

Several pivots later, I founded Playbux in 2021-2022. It’s a culmination of the lessons and experiences I’ve gathered over thirty years of working in tech.

Awesome. Did Web3 entail any major change or capability unlock to make Playbux possible?

Yes, of course. Web3 has the potential to completely redefine the entertainment industry and make it more user-centric and fair. Especially in terms of incentive alignment and value sharing.

One big reason I started Playbux was the massive opportunity that Web3 gaming and metaverse unlocked. My nephew introduced me to Roblox, which has tens of millions of users. But they’re mostly kids who don’t have money. So I thought of combining Roblox, shopping, commerce, and the metaverse experience into a novel cashback system.

Now, Playbux has grown into a platform where you can earn cashback and prizes for anything entertaining in Web3. From Walk-to-Earn to Watch-to-Earn to games like Conquer-to-Earn. Play on Playbux truly means anything you can do for fun.

Can users directly purchase from retailers on your platform and earn cashback? How does it work?

Yes, they can. We have 10K+ global merchants—all big brands. But it’s localized, so you get personalized offers, deals, or even items based on your region.

It’s like buying from established Web2 brands but receiving cashback and rewards in Web3. That’s one of the main bridges we gap.

This is crucial to overcome the initial hurdle of unfamiliarity and make reasonable progress towards mass adoption.

Making on-chain gaming, entertainment, eCommerce, etc. cheaper and better for everyone to join in is our key mission at Playbux. We’re building an AI-powered, zero-gas L1 framework to this end.

Since you mentioned AI, how does it feature in Playbux’s solution?

AI is at the core of our vision to revolutionize the Web3 UX. We’ve built the Real Intelligence (RI) Engine to translate the nature of human-environment interactions onto the digital realm.

The RI Engine is the outcome of over seven years of efforts in developing a custom AI logic. The model is based on human senses and cognition. It analyzes the users’ preferences in terms of vision, taste, smell, hearing, touch, and even thought.

To analyze sight, for example, we track users’ interactions with shapes, etc. For taste, we use their food and beverage preferences. And so on. Our white paper has an in-depth explanation of how this works.

Overall, the main use of AI in Playbux is to offer users what they like — at the right time, place, and price.

Great! But it seems there’s a lot of data involved. How do you ensure privacy and security in this context?

Short answer—thanks to Web3. Users interact with Playbux using Metamask, etc. So while we know what they want and like, we don’t know who they are.

Our AI model can make inferences based on wallet addresses and doesn’t need personal information like names, phone numbers, etc. Unless the user specifically shares this information for some particular offer or service.

That’s perfect. So where to from here?

We have an exciting roadmap for Playbux. One of our community’s most loved games, ConquerToEarn, is getting a new upgrade, which will expand its scope significantly.

We are launching a new game soon. It’s called Bux Royale, where you can challenge other people for their NFTs. Another game is also in the pipeline, which we will announce soon. So for us, it’s all forward.

As for Web3 in general, I think the real hurdle to adoption is trust, not tech or infra. New users are afraid to try things out because there’s so much risk and negativity.

We can solve this by offering familiar experiences. Plus a truly secure and safe environment. Playbux is on a mission to ensure both. Sooner or later, the next billion users will actually—finally—come to Web3.