• Onchain gaming and infrastructure

Proof Of Play (PoP) is building decentralized games and infrastructure. They raised a $33M seed round led by a16z in 2023. They launched Pirate Nation, a fully on-chain game where players embark on quests, craft items, and engage in battles across seas to uncover treasures. All of the gameplay logic lives onchain in the form of smart contracts (500+).

Amitt, one of their co-founders is the co-creator of Farmville - one of the biggest casual games back in the days.

The fully onchain gaming ecosystem is still very young, with a total VC funding deployed estimated to be $200M.

• Pirate Nation activity

In July, the team had to close new signups due to a surge in activity, reaching 1 to 3M transactions per day.

• Proof Of Play Technology:

• A game wallet with no fees, no pop-ups and no transactions to sign.

• Token Mirroring: allows game items to be recognized and work seamlessly across chains without the need for bridging.

• Multichain: multiple, invisible EVM-compatible chains. They want to scale just like they did with servers for Farmville. This is what large successful web2 games do - "server sharding" - in order to accomodate large numbers of concurrent players.

• Apex is the name of their first L3 built on Arbitrum. Boss is the name of their second chain.

• A developper editor to encourage developers to build around Pirate Nation

• Founder’s Pirate NFT, $PIRATE & Proof Of Play Points

• Founder’s Pirate NFT Collection: $25M (supply 9999 - floor: 1ETH)

• $PIRATE: $0.22 | $52M | $221M FDV | 1B supply

The token generation event in June was a success, with 47% of tokens airdropped to players and Founder's Pirate holders, who were incentivized to hold and immediately stake for Proof of Play (PoP) points. Currently, 125 million PIRATE tokens are staked (57% of the circulating supply), with earlier staking providing a higher farming multiplier.

The coin saw a high at $0.47 in July as game activity was exploding. It ran again to $0.3 on August 24 as the team started communicating on the launch of the BOSS chain.

The launch of the BOSS chain is planned for today (August 29) - This is something to keep an eye on:

• Will they successfully ensure the continuity of the game while they upgrade to multichain?

• Will there be any technical issue? 

• If they succeed in technical scaling, it will be important to look at players data as they re open signups.

I am personally bullish on the Team capabilities to leverage multichain technology to scale and successfully onboard new players. I expect new flows to arrive on this coin once the Boss chain is released and activity makes new highs. Outflows are low as holders keep staking for PoP point despite short term volatility and team & investors are locked for 12 months.

As a fully onchain game, the economy is completely transparent. Everyone has access to the same information in real time. This is important. I think the first generation of crypto games suffered from information asymmetry between devs / players / traders.

With a vibrant economy that incentivizes grinding and leveling up. People like Pirate Nation because it’s fun but also because they are making money.

The chart looks good. I can see it rapidly run back to $0.3 - $0.47 on short term. It’s a new listed coin with a fresh chart, good data, good technology, fun game, top team and a new meta (onchain gaming). I believe this project has everything to be a top performer in the upcoming market expansion.