Proof of Play announced Tuesday it will cease operations after concluding it could not build a product and sustainable business that proved blockchain technology could underpin a new decentralized internet at scale. The studio behind Pirate Nation posted the announcement directly to X, where it confirmed it would open-source its code and artwork for future builders.
"When we started out, we believed games using blockchain tech had the potential to usher in a new, decentralized internet," the company wrote in its shutdown announcement. "Ultimately, we couldn't build a product and sustainable business that proved out this thesis at scale."
The closing follows a long deterioration that had already stripped the studio to a skeleton crew. Tracxn recorded a headcount of two at Proof of Play as of May 31, 2026. Co-founder and CEO Amitt Mahajan, the FarmVille co-creator, had already departed. Co-founder and product lead Adam Fern had also moved on, with his X bio listing him as head of product at Robinhood's DeFi division.
Pirate Nation's shutdown preceded the studio's by nearly a year
The game itself ended before the company. On August 18, 2025, Pirate Nation it would wind down, and the fully onchain RPG went dark on September 18, 2025. Its two dedicated Arbitrum Layer 3 networks, Apex and Boss, were retired one week later on September 25.
Pirate Nation: The Next Chapter
— Pirate Nation (@PirateNation) August 18, 2025
It’s been an extraordinarily busy time here at Proof of Play. For the last few years we’ve shipped hundreds of weekly updates and proved our tech in Pirate Nation. Our team has grown and evolved, added an entirely new line of business with vRNG…
The math behind the decision was direct. Peak daily active unique wallets had once exceeded 100,000. By the time of shutdown, that figure had dropped to approximately 10,000. Running the game and its two proprietary chains cost roughly $150,000 per month.
"The game has not attracted enough of an audience to justify continued investment and operation," the studio said at the time. It added that maintaining two chains "no longer makes sense from a dollars-and-cents business perspective."
The emotional weight of that decision was not hidden. Fern described it as "one of the most difficult decisions I've ever been part of," noting he had worked on the project almost daily for more than three years. Mahajan wrote that the loss was real regardless of whether the business reasons were sound.
"While the business reasons for moving on may be sound, it doesn't make the loss any easier for those who played, contributed, and believed in the project," he wrote.
Before those closures, Mahajan had publicly turned against the model the studio had been built on. In July 2025, he said the studio was "done giving tokens away" and called play-to-earn "fundamentally broken." Fern said the mechanics had made playing feel like "a job."
What the studio open-sourced and what happens to the PIRATE token
The Tuesday announcement confirmed that the Pirate Nation Unity game application, Pirate Nation smart contracts, and the studio's internal agent workflow tool for rapid software development will all be made available on GitHub. The Founder Pirates NFTs and the Pirate Nation artwork, IP, and logos are available under a CC0 license.
The Pirate Nation Foundation, which is described as independent from Proof of Play, will continue supporting the PIRATE token and keep its website operational. Proof of Play points, however, will not be redeemable for anything.
Shiba Story Go!, another title in the studio's portfolio, was acquired by an unidentified third party and will continue to operate independently.
CoinMarketCap data shows that the PIRATE token currently trades around $0.001099, approximately 99.7% below its all-time high of $0.4757. Market cap sits below $1 million. Circulating supply stands at 718,019,546 out of a 1 billion token cap.
What Proof of Play built and how much it raised
The studio was founded in New York in 2022 by Mahajan, Craig Woida, and Mark Skaggs. It raised $33 million in a seed round in September 2023, with Andreessen Horowitz's a16z crypto fund and Greenoaks leading. The a16z investment came with public support for the studio's thesis that fully onchain games, where assets and game logic live permanently on public blockchains, represented a meaningful technological direction.
At their peak, Proof of Play's Apex and Boss networks ranked among the two largest gas consumers tracked across Ethereum's rollup ecosystem. That infrastructure represented a genuine technical accomplishment. It also represented ongoing cost that player numbers could not justify.
After Pirate Nation closed, the studio launched the Proof of Play Arcade on Abstract on July 31, 2025, a platform for smaller modular games that kept blockchain infrastructure less visible. YGG Play joined as a publishing partner. According to Fern, the studio's underlying infrastructure was used to power additional products, including Shiba Story Go. That pivot did not produce the commercial footing the company needed.
Gunel Ismayilova
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