Matt Van

We've begun shipping out 2nd laptops to our team We found that folks, both eng and non-eng, were limited by how many agents they could run at once on their machines. To draw a music analogy, it's like adding another deck to mix on.

We've had a lot of changes at Proof of Play over the last few months and figured it was a good time to succinctly share what we've been up to: 1. Pirate Nation -> Proof of Play Arcade (live on Abstract) We are reviving the concept of playing games for fun, rather than for financial gain. We made the call a few months ago to shut off $PIRATE emissions from Pirate Nation, recognizing that the business case doesn't make any sense. Paying players to play your game in your own native token, only to constantly apply sell pressure on your chart while not actually improving player spend or achieving a large top-of-funnel in the long run, is a dead end. Pirate Nation was great for what it was - a proving ground for numerous technical achievements at the company and a fertile ground to craft an original IP we love. However, the costs to operate it fully onchain simply were no longer supported by the player base. So we shut it down, but preserved the best parts of the game loops to live on in our Arcade on Abstract. We're currently supporting live-ops and have seen great user engagement and revenue metrics. We knew Pirate Nation had some truly exciting pieces of gameplay, but the joy was swapped out when "playing" turned into "working." The big picture here is to bring fun game experiences to a large crypto audience through Abstract's consumer portal or any other chains that have broad retail appeal. Player spend allows us to reinvest time and effort into producing more joyful moments that lead to great memories for players. Call it a fun-flywheel. 2. Onchain Services Business As long as blockchain companies exist, there will be a need for outsourcing services, much like the vast majority of web2 businesses utilizing AWS for various operational needs. Simply put, outsourcing specific components of your tech stack to experts who can reliably support operations at a lower price point than developing the solution in-house makes business sense. We believe there is room for an "AWS of crypto" that provides numerous necessary services for onchain operations. We've started to enter this market. Our first hit product is vRNG - our best-in-class onchain verifiably random number generator, providing provably fair randomness for a variety of purposes across 10+ EVM chains. We developed the technology for this product in Pirate Nation and have provided over 100 million random number calls to clients this year without a single failure. 3. Game #2 Our core community has already begun receiving access to our next standalone title. Our team is comprised of elite game designers and we're excited to get back to producing hits - but this time outward focused for the broader mobile market rather than inward facing to the smaller (but growing) crypto-native audience. As with Pirate Nation, we will use Game 2 to prove out our new product offerings, starting with the Marketplace API product. We believe markets are core to memorable game experiences, and we've developed a plug-and-play solution for any app developer on any chain (or not on a chain at all) to implement player-to-player markets revolving around in-game items. Users get the joy of participating in trade, which is innate to human interaction and a core feature in games since the first online games in the 1990s, and developers get an increased LTV for every install, allowing more aggressive UA strategies. The Marketplace API product handles all the blockchain complexity in the background. Users see dollars. Developers see fees (and potentially DeFi yields on TVL in player wallets). Everyone sees a better experience. This represents a seismic shift for LTVs and user acquisition - and, we believe, will compel many traditional developers to incorporate DeFi features into their games.