'Pirate Nation' Studio Reveals Network for Fully On-Chain Games on Arbitrum

Proof of Play, the studio behind blockchain role-playing game Pirate Nation, announced Thursday that it is launching an Arbitrum-based network of chains designed for fully on-chain games and other decentralized applications (dapps).

Called Proof of Play’s Multichain, the network is described as an “ultra-fast constellation of blockchains” powered by Arbitrum Orbit, an Ethereum scaling technology.

Multichain will initially be used to power the studio’s own Pirate Nation, which it said last year would migrate from Ethereum scaler Polygon over to Arbitrum. But instead of simply finding a new home for its own game, Proof of Play plans to open up Multichain to other game and dapp developers, joining a growing ecosystem of Arbitrum gaming networks.

“Our goal is to make it super simple for anyone looking to build on-chain games to work with our tech and have infrastructure to support them,” Proof of Play co-founder and CEO Amitt Mahajan told Decrypt’s GG.

Multichain is expected to launch in the coming days, and Pirate Nation will debut on Apex, the network’s first chain. Pirate Nation’s gameplay will run entirely off of Multichain, while the game’s Founder’s Pirates NFTs will continue to live on the Ethereum mainnet.

In March 2023, Proof of Play announced its plans to migrate away from Polygon, explaining that running its on-chain game—which is built around a stack of smart contracts, which contain the code to power autonomous dapps—had become costly due to network fees. Proof of Play told Decrypt's GG at the time that it had been subsidizing players’ gas fees (i.e. transaction costs) to the tune of $3,000 to $4,000 a day.

Most blockchain games do not store their gameplay code and other core elements on-chain, but rather run games on external servers while bringing in on-chain elements like crypto tokens or unique NFT assets. The studio said that Arbitrum’s technology enables games to run fully on-chain without unnecessary delays or hitches.

“Their technology is a particularly strong fit for ours, given our ambition is to build fully on-chain games that are indistinguishable from their off-chain counterparts in terms of speed and scale,” Mahajan explained.

After migrating to Multichain, Pirate Nation will implement new features like real-time player-vs-player (PVP) combat, Mahajan said, as well as “onboard users from other platforms such as mobile phones.” Proof of Play raised $33 million in funding last September in a round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Greenoaks Capital.

Multichain’s launch comes just a week after the ApeCoin DAO—the community collective behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem token—voted to launch an “ApeChain” layer-3 network on Arbitrum.

Longtime Arbitrum gaming network Treasure also plans to launch its own upgraded Treasure Chain, plus the Xai layer-3 gaming network recently launched on Arbitrum with a token airdrop to early contributors.