chiptopher

A lot of useful conversation, healthy venting & necessary criticism in the @PirateNation ecosystem over the last few days. I wanted to address some of the questions and reiterate our focus areas in the coming days/weeks. To be clear, we are a hybrid team of OG game devs, veteran founders, and crypto-native degens. Balancing between these different ideals is essential for a team to succeed in this space. 1. Let's start with the thing most people really care about: $PIRATE. The biggest structural issue I see is the current staking system, which is clearly too harsh and off-putting to later entrants. This is reflected in the data and qualitative feedback from people who are interested in our ecosystem but don't enter. The @PirateNationFDN partially addressed this with their last update by introducing a long-term loyalty multiplier, so later entrants can partially catch up -- but it's not enough. From a design perspective, it's crucial that people feel able to catch up. (Long-lock mechanisms that other products employ are one way of doing this, but there are many others.) Nobody likes to feel late in crypto, especially not at a time when there are so many opportunities to be early to something else. The great news is that the foundation has prioritized resolving this issue and has constructed a plan. For starters, the $PIRATE staking multiplier cap is being raised to 700%, and the weekly accrual rate is increasing to 100% so everyone can hit the maximum multiplier. 2. How $PIRATE and Proof of Play intersect. To date, it has been largely unclear what the plans for $PIRATE are regarding @ProofOfPlay's future ecosystem. If you don’t have Proof of Play Points yet, don’t worry—"You are not late." Owning $PIRATE, whether holding or staking, is what matters. This is just the beginning—we can adapt quickly based on feedback. We recognize that the lack of information and clarity to date is a problem. Thankfully, like the other areas and issues discussed above, there is a simple solution: tell you how it will all work by being as clear and direct as soon as it is possible to do so. Coming up, our #1 priority is to clarify $PIRATE's role in the Proof of Play ecosystem. There’s also a lot of confusion as to whether or not we’re focused entirely on Pirate Nation or on Proof of Play infrastructure. Pirate Nation has always been central to our Proof of Play's growth strategy. It’s a showcase application and ecosystem to demonstrate how you can build scalable, efficient onchain applications using our technology. There is no Proof of Play without the success of Pirate Nation and its ecosystem. We do not build infrastructure in isolation — every infrastructure effort has been in service of enabling new gameplay and/or scaling Pirate Nation. Pirate Nation players are proving and demonstrating the potential of Proof of Play technology. It is a case study that shows the services we’re building are useful, fast, gas-efficient, and scalable to millions of users. For this reason, our primary focus is ensuring that Pirate Nation players, holders of $PIRATE, and stakers who have earned Proof of Play points are a major part of the Proof of Play ecosystem and story going forward. We’ll have a separate announcement about Founder’s Pirates' role in that ecosystem in the near future. 3. Proof of Play is NOT a gaming chain — it’s an any-chain, any-app set of services for ambitious, scalable applications. Our vision is to power the next generation of gas-efficient, scalable apps through an affordable set of onchain services. We believe in the decentralized internet and are building for the future in which every single person is onchain — most of whom will never realize it because the crypto is beneath the hood. We’ve started to announce some of our plans around how the work pioneered with Pirate Nation & battle-tested by the Pirate Nation community will benefit other builders in the Ethereum ecosystem. Onchain Heroes and Gigaverse are both using Proof of Play’s technology with their game launches on the Abstract chain. This has resulted in two significant milestones for PoP in the last week: - Proof of Play is now a multi-chain service provider (running on both Arbitrum and ZKSync chains, with plans to expand to more). - Multiple third parties are now utilizing Proof of Play’s technology. 4. Future Game development. Thankfully, most of our players are here because they care about playing great games and want to know what we will do with the gameplay for Pirate Nation. Pirate Nation has been live for two years, but let me be clear: it's still in development (we're not even v1.0 yet!). There are core features people want that are in our near-term backlog - such as 'proper' PvP (the current version is essentially an early preview.) Every time someone says 'X isn't fun' or 'Why don't we have Y yet?' - that's an opportunity for Pirate Nation. This includes the elephant in the room: mobile. Over 100 game updates have been shipped since the launch of the game. That's around one per week. Now that many core game systems are in place, as is the necessary infra to scale, we can ship faster than ever before. My prediction for 2025 is that more significant game updates go live than the previous two years combined. However, growing the player base, making the game much more fun, and launching mobile is only part of the solution. 5. Getting the word out. While a great game, utility, and sinks for a token are important, we’re under no delusion that these things are enough to make a game or its token successful. Ecosystems live or die based on distribution. As with most tokens, usage and adoption are tightly correlated with sentiment. The importance of marketing (including the right people saying, "This is a good coin.") cannot be overstated. The ideal scenario is one in which product fundamentals (DAU/retention/ARPU) are supported & juiced by marketing. As a team, I believe our emphasis on fundamentals is a strength, not a weakness. We don't cut corners. Following our work over the last six months, we are now in an ideal position to ramp up our marketing to grow awareness and mindshare of our ecosystem, welcome more players to the game through mobile, and loudly amplify what’s coming from Proof of Play. 6. TL;DR. The purpose of this post is not to pre-announce everything we're about to do. (You'll see all that for yourself over the days and weeks ahead.) It's to articulate how we got here, how deeply we think and care about our ecosystem, and what remaining problems we are working to solve as quickly as possible. The best is yet to come. If you've stuck around this long, then know we are all in. If you're considering joining us just now, over the months ahead, we'll make sure you look back at this moment and realize this was an inflection point. Onward 🏴‍☠️