a7111a.eth 🍌

I'm 100% confident that the trenches will grow SIGNIFICANTLY over the coming months and years last time we saw hypergrowth, the ecosystem was incredibly young, with immature products and very small teams now we're bigger, more focused, and have never moved as fast Ascend.

I've recently been helping a zillennial friend in Canada house hunt and I cannot tell you how radicalizing the experience has been. Absolute shitholes going for 2x their worth. Houses listed at 4-5x what they were bought at just a few years ago. Swarms of investors clamoring to bid up anything remotely decent. Boomers confidently rejecting even perfectly reasonable offers because they know they can get a few dollars more from some indian caravan pooling 10 incomes to buy their single-family dwelling. The most recent house he went to view had been on the market for less than 3 hours when he contacted the agent and already had 5 blind offers on it he was expected to compete with. Young people have been systematically robbed of the opportunity to own a home - something that was once an anticipated, reasonable, and common milestone in life. The ripple effect of generational and social consequences this has had cannot be overstated.

The double standards in this industry are honestly ridiculous. Countless examples of founders (especially L1 founders) essentially exit scamming their own projects after making 9-10 figures by producing absolutely nothing of value. These people are supported by the largest VCs and other influential people in this industry and it's just all part of the giant grift game of extracting as much money from uninformed investors as possible. Most of the influential people in the industry won't call this out because they're either directly involved in it or don't want to burn bridges/their reputation out of fear of getting locked out of future opportunities. Instead, these same people will hyper-fixate on useless stuff like the EF selling tiny amounts of ETH or Vitalik "not doing enough for Ethereum" or the ETH maxis being "too toxic" because somehow it's socially acceptable to shame those who don't grift or exit scam and instead have very long-term time horizons. It's just all incredibly disappointing and demotivating for genuine people and while the effect may not be obvious on the surface, it does degrade and erode the value of this industry over time.

Pirate Nation: The Next Chapter 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 and expanded to new chains. While diehard community supporters have been with us every step of the way, the game has not attracted enough of an audience to justify continued investment and operation. Given that, we are sunsetting the fully onchain Pirate Nation game along with the Apex and Boss chains at earliest 30 days from today. The reality is that running two chains no longer makes sense from a dollars and cents business perspective. We love Pirate Nation and believe we developed great onchain tech that was proved out through the game. We also believe that successful businesses will be ones that prioritize positive cashflow verticals. The demand for the fully onchain version of Pirate Nation simply isn’t there to sustain operation indefinitely - as such, the best parts of the game will live on via the Proof of Play Arcade on Abstract. The arcade format allows us to bring over different parts of the game over time and even to other chains in the future. We’re streamlining the Proof of Play ecosystem and turning a laser focus on revenue streams for the company. We want our products to be fun, profitable, and so broadly accessible that the end user would never know they’re interacting with crypto if the application didn’t say “Powered by Proof of Play.” Additionally, we’re hosting one final two week event where players can burn all items acquired within Pirate Nation. Burned items will provide Plunder Certificates that will be eligible for future rewards. When we started the onchain gaming journey years ago, the factory-style, rewards-in-perpetuity model for NFTs was the industry standard and seen as the only acceptable route. We minted Founder’s Pirates for free and provided multiple token allocations and in-game benefits for holders. We greatly value the support and community built up around these assets. Given the shutdown of Pirate Nation, going forward our time and resources will be much more successful in supporting a single token ecosystem. Regarding Founder’s Pirates, there will be a final $PIRATE allocation for Founder’s Pirates and afterwards they will transition to a community identity NFT with no further token claims. This will drastically simplify the Proof of Play ecosystem and clear up a lot of space for the upcoming evolution of the $PIRATE token. We’ve expressed publicly that we value $PIRATE, and these changes help solidify our messaging that the best way to align with the Proof of Play ecosystem is by holding $PIRATE. Thank you to everyone who sailed with us. The ticker is $PIRATE.