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.

@fern was awesome working with you ser! will never forget your undying hate for the polygon bridge forcing us to create something new in mirroring!

chat - some bittersweet news to share: I’ve recently left Proof of Play Not an easy call, but the right one for me. Looking back, nothing but fond memories, even through dark times. We shipped Pirate Nation, the largest, most ambitious fully onchain game ever built. We pioneered best-in-class UX on an EVM chain before anyone believed it was possible: gasless, signless, seamless. We proved you could build a massive, fully onchain game that was fun. I turned into a professional random number salesman. I vibe-coded in public before it was a buzzword. We built a thriving community of gamer dads… until the Vietnamese farmers showed up and turned our economy into a warzone. We migrated across 3 chains, then built two of our own (Apex and Boss), which did more MGas and txn volume than every other chain combined. We hired amazing and brilliant individuals, survived 2 brutal bears and 1 confusing bull, bought the literal pico top of Art Gobblers (still hurts), and flipped between heroes and villains. It was an absolutely exhilarating ride. But my time has come to move onto a new adventure. Fun fact that most don't know: Before kids, I used to moonlight in fine dining restaurants on nights and weekends as a hobby after my tech day job. With this downtime, I'm returning to 'cook,' in the literal sense of the word this time. For now, brace for unrelenting food content. I'll be cooking, hunting the most delicious spots in NYC, taking mediocre photos, and devouring everything in sight until i tackle the next challenge. And yes, more on what's next for me soon... - Fern 🏴‍☠️

🏴‍☠️ Week 22 @AbstractChain @PirateNation POP Arcade Strategy Guide ✳️ Week 22 will run for 8 days to align with the holiday season. It ends on Friday! The Boss Raid has returned to a shorter round format. Personally, I prefer this. It would be even better if the difficulty decreases and those curse cards disappear. Round Composition 1-1, 2-1, 2-2(Boss), 3-1, 3-2, 3-3(Boss), 3-4, 4-1, 4-2(Boss), 5-1, 5-2(Boss), 5-3(Main Boss). There are a total of 4 Sub-boss rounds and 1 Main Boss round. The Main Boss is the ICE Queen. Character Recommendations Admiral Longhorn: Highly recommended! He has excellent Area Attack capabilities, and his Echo Shot is incredibly powerful. Koa Nalu: Another solid choice, especially if you want to focus on Evasion. El Fuego: If you are aiming for a "Best Run," choose him. He possesses powerful cards specifically tailored for boss encounters.

The “Alpha” V1 version of our casino is live! Randomness secured by @ProofOfPlay Sign in with an email / X, deposit @apecoin into the self custody wallet provided, then play frictionless on-chain games with ZERO signing or transaction interruptions V1 has Roulette, Dice, Plinko, Lootbox, Hide the $HOES, Mines & coin flip We will be building our slot games next and V2 is already being cooked up. For now, bets are low. After our main collection mint we will jack the bets up ⬆️ Only 150 people will be allowed into Alpha. Welcome to the Lazy Bull Club 🎰 lazybull.club

@misspurple @EFDevcon @FOCGERS @ProofOfPlay @awtnmy @wighawag @lordOfAFew I know these guys! Good group :)

yapped on a fun gaming panel on Appchains at @EFDevcon 🤓 props to the @FOCGERS team for putting this together was an honour to chat about @ProofOfPlay with all these cracked Panelists 💜

Building an onchain economy comes with great responsibility We're excited to partner with @ProofOfPlay and use vRNG to power important parts of Fishing Frenzy

This week on Base:  ■ @Coinbase rolled out DEX trading to all U.S. users (ex. NY). Millions of assets, moments after launch, right from the app.  ■ $200M of USDC is already earning ~10% APY on @Coinbase in just two weeks, powered by @MorphoLabs.  ■ Base Chain hit a new all-time high: $5.3B in TVL, nearly 3x from last year.  ■ @benjitaylor joined the Base team as Head of Design.  ■ The 20 winners of the Onchain Summer Awards were announced, with $200K in prizes awarded.  ■ ‘The Based 500,’ a short doc on BaseCamp by @pttrn_ntgrty, was coined on @zora.  ■ Launch Groups by @flaunchgg are live, meaning any token on Base can now be imported to Flaunch.  ■ @blupryntco completed its first international KYI pilot and demoed the tech before Brazil’s central bank and regulators.  ■ @ProofOfPlay's Marketplace API went live on Base.  ■ @ethos_network introduced Ethos Broker for OTC trading and hit 25K contributors, 450K monthly visitors, and $5M+ securing reputation.  ■ @sportfun is expanding to American football and basketball.  ■ @bballxyz's beta is live, letting you draft your all-star squad and hit the court.  ■ @PistachioFi added one-tap crypto buys via Apple Pay.  ■ The @baseapp beta leveled up group chats, add AI agents like @flaunchybot and @bankrbot to trade or send money in seconds.  ■ @KeyboardCatBase hit the streets of Miami, SF, and LA with a new campaign. ■ Examples of new tokens launched this week on Aerodrome include $PHI (@phi_xyz) and $PLAY (@itplaysout) ■ @Cypher_HQ_ launched new initiatives powering decentralized rewards and payments  ■ @blackbird's FLYNET volume is up 1000% since launch, with Denver and SF live and LA next.  ■ @CalaxyApp hit 10K new users in its first week. Based builders keep shipping. The onchain world keeps expanding.

Proof of Work (Edition #1): Our new bi-monthly product update. 🎯 Reminder: Our mission is to onboard millions of people to web3 through fun and innovative products. Our strategy is building revenue-generating games and layering in the best parts of web3. ⏪ In Case You Missed It (last 2 weeks) 💠 Engaged with our strongest PN community supporters 💠 Streamlined the PoP ecosystem around $PIRATE 💠 Powered 20+ vRNG customers across 7 chains 💠 Supercharged PN Arcade with new themes & features (130+ ETH in lifetime revenue!) 💠 Perfected the first time user experience in Shiba Story Go, our newest mobile title ⏩ What’s next up: 🔶 Arcade: More weekly comps, including an exciting new partnership 🔶 Shiba Story Go: Additional new features shipping daily ahead of scaling up growth 🔶 Marketplace API: Many dev convos lined up ⚡At Proof of Play, we’re busier than ever, energy is high and vibes are great. Hope you’re as excited as we are.

We've reduced session lengths by 64% in the Proof of Play Arcade to ~9m! Early on, we got A LOT of feedback from time poor (but money rich) degens that the game was too time consuming and wanted quicker sessions. Prize pool is up to $15k this week, what are you waiting for?

@fern @icobeast @solsticefi Please make the code “pineapplepizza” just rolls off the tongue

Ico has enough flares for Solstice already, please stop using his ref code. As a New Yorker on the verge of being under a Communist mayor, it's time to share the wealth. Please use my code instead: evz9Dp8ygU my children thank you for putting food on the table

Presenting the $PIRATE Shop in the Proof of Play Arcade! As part of our commitment to embracing a single token ecosystem, we're excited to reintroduce sinks for $PIRATE. Arcade players can now buy packs of Mystic Rerolls with $PIRATE.

🌍 Rep Your Region Event Live Now in Pirate Nation PoP Arcade (2 days left) 📜Breakdown: You’ll pick your country or region, and your Total Runs + Best Run will be tracked — with your region’s PFP flag flexing beside your score. Your Best Run score decides which flag shows next to your name.🗺️ Rep one of the following countries: USA, Ukraine, Japan, Brazil, Korea, Vietnam, EU, Hong Kong, and World Stars (everyone else). The teams were picked based on top PoP Arcade traffic.🚗🏎️ 🧮 Key Mechanics/Scoring: • Prizes are individual only — no team-level scoring🤷‍♂️ • Everyone gets the same starting deck🃏 • Top 100 on each leaderboard get paid🏆 • Prize pool split: 85% for Total Runs, 15% for Best Run📊 • Pot seeded with 3 ETH (50% above usual)💰 🆕 Fresh Quality‑of‑Life Additions & Game Changes • See your current payouts in both ETH and USD💸 • Must draft a card each turn — no more passing❌ • Stormfront Assault is now a damage card💢 • Affinities matter more — be careful with how many hits you take🔯 • Armor‑piercing attacks: half damage ignores shields🛡️ ⚠️ Reminder: XP distribution is handled by Abstract. The XP displayed on Tuesday reflects last week’s competition results — not the ones you’re playing now. Time to hoist your flag and jump into Week 9 — the seas await 🏴‍☠️ Can you beat the US?🇺🇸 Play now ➡️arcade.piratenation.game/?ref=0xb845ACb… @PirateNation @AbstractChain @ProofOfPlay

@DroegeDaniel @SamSteffanina @PirateNation @amittm Amitts numbers were for hardware only, this is cloud costs for nodes, sequencers, indexers etc. Labor cost was not included and these were raw costs pop was not charging pn.

Did Pirate nation pay Proof of Play for their services? Surely, you can't consider the left hand passing the right hand as revenue or a real cost. Valve doesn't pay steam 30% cut on their revenue... You only charge 3rd parties. Do these estimates include labor, such as Ico_beast? Don't you think the customers would have preferred a batched and compressed on-chain game than a shutdown fully on-chain game?

Controversy has been swirling around @PirateNation. Founder/CEO @amittm went unfiltered on Gamified. Here are 10 key moments from 90 mins: 1. Amitt said in early conversations with exchanges, the team found no appetite for $POP, "If you have an existing token out that's not really performing, you don't really get to launch a second one" The idea was that Founder Pirates would get a healthy allocation of POP and that would resolve some of the “expectation debt.” The overall “gaming meta” had cooled, making exchanges even more reluctant. By July, the team admitted POP wasn't likely “Okay, shit, this is probably not going to happen.” With no exchange support, the second token couldn’t launch. That forced them to re-evaluate how to handle Founder Pirates and the wider ecosystem. Quick note before #2 I really recommend listening to the entire thing on Spotify/Apple podcasts so you can hear full context and how Amitt delivered the information, i'll put the link in the comments. 2. Cost of Pirate Nation: At its peak, ~80k DAU, but chain costs ballooned to $60k per chain/month. The economics didn’t work; retention and LTV (lifetime value) didn’t cover infrastructure costs. 3. Proof of Play decided to sunset Pirate Nation and move toward mobile-first casual games with thin DeFi layers (e.g. Shiba Story Go). The thesis has shifted from “bring games to Web3” to “bring Web3 to games.” 4. He mentioned that one of the biggest mistakes they ever made was the whitepaper language calling the Founders Pirates the “premier asset” of the ecosystem. Expectations ran away (community assumed nodes, perpetual rewards, etc.). To be clear - he owned this as THEIR mistake and wasn't blaming the community. he also added “People loved those [Founders Pirate] NFTs, they had history with them, and we asked them to burn them. It was disrespectful. I regret that decision deeply.” “We were trying to be clever with mechanics, but it came across as careless. That’s on us.” 5. Hopes he understands that himself and the Pirate Nation team are “incompetent, not malicious.” Emphasized mistakes came from naivety in lack of narrative control plus misreading emotional attachment to NFTs. 6. ICO Beast hire: Clarified his short stint was coincidence, not strategy. Accusations: Some in the community framed it as a “strategic pump-and-dump” move i.e. bring in a known DeFi operator to spin up hype before abandoning the original project. Amitt’s clarification: The hire was short-lived and coincidental. ICO Beast never had token control, allocation, or the ability to dump on holders. “If this was a pump-and-dump, it would be the worst rug pull in history because we never sold a single Pirate, and we never sold tokens.” He also said he "really enjoyed his time working with @icobeast and hopes to work with him again in the future". 7. After a question from @SpikeCollects he acknowledged that the team is open to the product being transferred to a good custodian of it. Amitt: “I’ve never sold mine. I still love this collection. I just don’t think I’m the right custodian for it anymore.” “If someone else with the right vision wanted to carry it forward, I’d support that.” 8. Amitts Infrastructure Thesis: Real-money marketplaces and stablecoin rails as a revenue driver. Developers can earn both secondary market fees and yield on stables held in player wallets. He's bullish on this idea being so +EV that it would force potentially all games to become web3 games in order to bolster their treasuries. 9. The burn regret: He said requiring Founder Pirates to be burned to claim tokens was a big regret. “That turned the knife.” and "we didn't realize how much people cared about their pirates". He also went on to say he's been speaking with more community members recently and he wished he had done it earlier. @TheGodMurdoch (Pirate Nation community figure) called him “a good guy who made mistakes.” in the comments during the episode. 10. They’re planning to open-source their Unity client + infrastructure. He hopes this will help other teams succeed. Here's my takeaway as the host 1. In Web3, expectation debt is as dangerous as financial debt. 2. Overpromise and you’re stuck paying it back forever, even if your intentions were good. 3. Not every failed project is a rug, certainly not this one, even if an asset ended up hitting 0 at the end of the day. 4. Proof of Play still has the funds, the team, and the vision to build again. 5. Amitt showed up, admitted mistakes, and took heat live for 90 minutes which began to build back trust from my point of view. Grateful for him taking the time and impressed by his ability to handle what is a very difficult situation.

State growth - Blockchains have to store the history of every action on-chain and we had over 1billion transactions on the chain, creating terrabytes of data that each node had to run on. Not cheap! Hopefully state growth problem is solved in next few years to make it viable again!

@SamSteffanina @PirateNation @amittm Why did it cost $60k to run each chain/month when the players dwindled? Because they have a fixed cost of selling themselves VRNG services that nobody wanted or asked for. They were robbing peter (you) to pay paul (themselves)

@DegenJablko @PirateNation @AbstractChain That pic of cyclops shooting the crab is awesome

🧵Week #7 @PirateNation Arcade Meta Update - Bagholder Brawl! (no loop) 🏴‍☠️ This week comes with the biggest changes so far: All captains were reworked - each one now represents an @AbstractChain memecoin that PN partnered with. All of them have the same exact deck for fair competition → no need to worry about picking the “right” one 👀 This week is (finally?) without loops, but the Boss - Crab, and his minions are super strong. Gameplay itself was shortened → only 18 waves instead of 26 🏃 New mechanic: Mystic Offers - spend tickets for special buffs (heals, +dmg, redraws, etc...) 🎟️ 💰 Leaderboard rewards raised to $28k, powered by Abstract memecoin communities Let's dive into this week's meta 👇

@Bearycoin @Bassokarhu @ProofOfPlay Beary are serious about climbing!

Ahoy pirates of our community, To celebrate the partnership with @ProofOfPlay, we are giving away 3 Bearyz NFTs to the first players who manage to score 280K pts with the Honey Hunter (Beary's Boat). All the info below 👇

Play to Earn is Dumb & @fern is Here to Tell You Why You saw & read the article that sparked the debate on X Now we're talking about where he believes crypto gaming must evolve & how @ProofOfPlay is going to take us there Listen now & tell us what you think👀

@Hisu0x @ProofOfPlay What team are you playing ser!

This week’s @ProofOfPlay Arcade prize pool is the biggest ABS has seen in a single week! ⚡️ Rule Update: You must play at least 20 credits (~$10) to enter the leaderboard. Only the Top 50 total runs from teams in the Top 3 overall will qualify. Less than 20 credits → ❌ Team not in Top 3 → ❌ Team Top 3 but not in Top 50 → ❌ ✅ Everyone else: congrats—you’re farming both ABS XP + $$$ 😎 Last week I bagged $400 profit + around 30K XP, and it looks like this week’s gonna be even crazier. Play smart, farm hard. Let’s eat! 🏴‍☠️

@fern I asked AI if this was the perfect pizza and instead of answering the question it just send me this image and said no this is the best pizza

this is to alert you of the ongoing competition in the proof of play arcade on Abstract. There is $25K+ (and growing) up for grabs and it's heating up with intense competition and betrayals as teams are recruiting top players and spenders. My money is on $pirate team

It's TIME for Arcade Week 7 - Bagholder Brawl! More than $25k in prizes up for grabs - with a twist! Only the top three teams win. Choose your Team, run up your score, and claim your prizes - full details of this week's updates below 👇