Crypto media outlet CoinDesk reports:
Amitt Mahajan, founder and CEO of Proof of Play, the developer behind the crypto game “Pirate Nation,” predicts a future with thousands of specialized blockchains, each supporting a single application.
This follows his experience creating the viral Facebook game Farmville, where Zynga operated approximately 64 databases just to prevent game crashes during the development of a casual farming simulator. For Mahajan, blockchain is simply an advanced database.
Mahajan told Decrypt’s GG, “At its peak, Farmville had about 30 million daily active users. So, to scale the game to that number, we had about 64 databases. In this world, blockchain is our database. Essentially, we’re using chains as our data stores. So, to scale to any real usage, we need cross-chain sharding of transactions.”
Previously, Pirate Nation was building on Ethereum scaling solution Polygon but shifted to Arbitrum Nova due to rising gas fees on Polygon. However, the project encountered issues relying on shared networks as launching new projects could increase gas costs for everyone on-chain.
In February of this year, Pirate Nation considered launching its own chain on Arbitrum under a project named Multichain, potentially for their own and other developers’ use.
The blockchain role-playing game Pirate Nation now sails on its own application-specific chain, Apex, with its founder seeing this as the logical future for other applications as well.
Mahajan told Decrypt, “Once you’re an app of any scale, you need to be able to predictably control your gas costs.” “My prediction is, as people separate from these shared second layers into application-specific chains, there will be thousands of chains.”
Screenshots from Pirate Nation. Image: Proof of Play
This trend has been seen across multiple blockchain networks. For instance, some games built on Avalanche are utilizing their own dedicated subnets like Shrapnel and the upcoming Off-the-Grid with the GUNZ network. Similarly, Treasure is constructing its Arbitrum-based Treasure Chain, featuring an “infinite chain” or dedicated gaming network.
Mahajan said, “Since launching on our application-specific chain, Pirate Nation has already begun filling up this chain with transactions—team is already considering a second chain for support.”
“We’ve essentially hit capacity on Apex,” Mahajan explained. “Now, to continue scaling the game, we need to add Chain B, Chain C, Chain D,” he added. “We’ll be adding more chains in the future to continue increasing and expanding our user base.”
The need for multiple chains may sound strange or concerning, but for Mahajan, who has experience building games in the Web2 world, it’s nothing new. It’s just a new iteration, requiring scalable architectures to support growing games.
Mahajan, who worked at Zynga from 2009 to 2011 leading the development of Farmville, noted that in the Web3 space, developers are concerned not with popular blockchain game crashes but with fee increases due to network congestion.
Since its time on Polygon, Pirate Nation has stated it was paying up to $4,000 daily in gas fees to seize assets from players—a cost that was unsustainable for the startup. While launching four or more chains just to run a crypto game may seem cumbersome, Mahajan sees the benefits of bulking up.
“Running 64 databases for Farmville was inconvenient for us,” he said. “It was inconvenient for us because we were among the first to do it. But then it became a product.”
Mahajan again uses Web2 to frame this correctly. The founder explained that to build products like Facebook, concepts like load balancing and caching had to be invented.
“If we can make a game with 1 million daily active users, that means you can build another dapp or a photo-sharing site or something else that can achieve 1 million DAU,” said Amitt Mahajan, founder and CEO of Pirate Nation.
This is part of Pirate Nation’s multi-chain product, with Apex being the first network launched. The Multichain initiative aims to open up to other game and dapp developers to launch their own networks, supported by Ethereum scaling tech Arbitrum Orbit.
“It’s coming. There are definitely people interested in this,” Mahajan said. “We need to solve our own scalability issues before competing with others.”
Dedicated Players
Pirate Nation’s expansion plans were devised following the launch of the Pirate token in June. Its listing on Coinbase witnessed a surge in Ethereum token value, but the founder wasn’t concerned about price at the token’s release.
Instead, according to Dune Analytics, he wanted to focus on the 80% of PIRATE tokens currently held by users. By staking these tokens, users can earn Proof of Play (PoP) points, which are expected to unlock additional benefits within the ecosystem. To some extent, this high percentage is due to PIRATE tokens not being locked up during staking and allowing users to spend them without penalties.
For the founder, the high token percentage is a bet on community confidence and indicates that the game isn’t attracting token-dumping farmers.
“People see staking as a recommitment to their long-term involvement, so for so many people to stake in such high numbers is encouraging,” explained Mahajan.
For those dedicated gamers, the biggest on-chain event is on the horizon.
Over the next month, the second World Boss Tournament will take place. This will see players team up to defeat bosses but also compete for their transactions to land the final blow. Players will be rewarded based on the damage they inflict, with a 1 in 1 NFT if they score the killing blow.
This event will be Pirate Nation’s largest in-game event to date. Consequently, networks could be tense, especially since developers are already considering a second chain to split transactions. Will it push Apex to its limits?
“We’ll see,” Mahajan chuckled in response.
Andrew Hayward, Editor