Taking onchain games to internet-scale

Proof of Play CEO Amitt Mahajan talks big vision

I realize that when I’ve recorded a good podcast, I say “best podcast ever”.

But with all due respect to the previous 180 episodes of Blockchain Gaming World, episode #181 with Proof of Play CEO Amitt Mahajan is my best podcast ever*.

I previously spoke to Amitt a year ago, following the announcement of Proof of Play’s $33 million seed round, which was led by a16z and Greenoaks, and the launch of its fully onchain game Pirate Nation.

Impressed by what he told me, I proceeded to buy a Gen0 Pirate and start playing the game regularly; decisions that paid off with the launch of the PIRATE token in June 2024.

Of course, I didn’t cash out then, instead staking my PIRATE for points for Proof of Play’s next token launch…

Which brings us to this week’s conversation, which as well as delving into some of the game’s features such as the new synchronous map and future updates to item crafting, focuses on Amitt’s longterm vision, which is to build the sort of infrastructure that can scale a fully onchain game (or app) to what he calls “internet-scale”.

‘When we were running FarmVille at Zynga, we needed 64 servers to handle 300 million players,’ he explains.

There aren’t any official numbers provided for Pirate Nation thus far — “we’ve 100x our DAUs in a year” Amitt says — nevertheless, the launch of PIRATE via a play-to-airdrop event put a lot of pressure on the game’s Apex L3 chain, resulting in the gating of access for players.

This has since been lifted as Proof of Play’s second L3 called Boss has now gone live, with the two chains ranking #1 and #3 respectively in terms of gas usage, at least as tracked via the Rollups.wtf website.

“When we start to open source our tech so people can use it, we need to show that it works. That’s the reason building Pirate Nation is important,” he says

“It allows us the opportunity to solve these problems. Now we have a basket of technology that can be used to build other applications.”

Aside from such issues, I also really enjoyed Amitt’s attitude to oft-quoted blockchain issues such as token price and bots.

“When I think about how I spend my time and where I focus my energy, it’s entirely around where I have agency. Everything else — token price, NFT price — all of that is just lagging indicators of did you build something people want to play?” he states.

---

* of course, I mean “best podcast to-date”.

---

Sponsored by Hiro Capital: investing 📈 in the future 🔮 of gaming 🎮

---

Calendar

• Guild of Guardians’ monthly staking rewards go live — 2nd October

• UK Gambling Commission’s case against Sorare — 4th October

• Shardbound goes live via Steam and Epic Games Store — 9th October

• Sky Mavis stops subsidizing Ronin transactions — 9th October

• Ragnarok: Monster World’s first season starts — 10th October

• Fight League’s first NFT mint on Ronin — 10th October

• Mythical’s Forest token airdrop event ends — 13th October

• Loot Legends launches through app stores — 14th October

• Next FOMC meeting: 50bps cut now not expected — 7th November

No Free Gas news

• Sky Mavis has announced that it’s stopping free gas for Ronin wallet users. Up-to-this-point, it’s been subsidizing transactions but this service will stop on 9th October. In part, this is thanks to the launch of Ronin Waypoint, which is its version of Immutable’s Passport wallet and onboarding tech. Using this, users can create a smart contract wallet via social logins that doesn’t have a seed phrase.

Sky Mavis will still gift new wallets five free transactions but beyond this, users will either have to pay gas themselves or developers can subsidize transactions for their games or NFT trading.

Transactions on Ronin are pretty cheap — in the order of a few cents. Nevertheless it will be interesting to see how this new friction impacts user numbers or RON token price!

At present, Ronin has around 1 million DAUWs, the majority of which are from Pixels.

Blankos Back news

• Blankos NFTs have now migrated to Polkadot and hence holders can now view their inventories via the Mythical Market. Trading is also expected to restart in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we can all just act surprised about just how many NFTs we bought in 2021-22, in my case 208, of which 13 are single-digit serial numbers.

Thankfully I’ve forgotten how expensive they were to buy, but I’m sure there’ll be an option to see the damage before too long.

TON > ∑Apps news

• Last week, I was discussing the fat/thin protocol thesis in the context of the marketcap of AXs and RON. But when it comes to the Telegram-adjacent TON blockchain, it seems pretty clear that the rewards arising from all the viral activity being generated by its hundreds of crypto-related tappy mini-apps is flowing to underlying protocol, not the apps themselves.

At least that’s what I see when I graph the token price performance of some notable TON games during 2024 so far.

Of course the TON token itself has been around for much longer, going live in August 2021, while the more recent airdrop vibes were kicked off by NOT’s launch in May. CATI, HMSTR and WAT went live in late September, with very similar subsequent results.

It all begs the question “did you build something people want to play?”.