- Proof of Play said on 4 August it is winding down, three years after raising US$33 million in a seed round co-led by a16z and Greenoaks.
- The studio published the Pirate Nation Unity client on GitHub on 17 June and the game’s artwork on 31 July under a CC0 licence, both weeks before the announcement.
- PIRATE traded at US$0.0012 on Thursday, 99.74% below its July 2024 high, with the independent Pirate Nation Foundation continuing to support it.
Blockchain gaming studio Proof of Play said on 4 August it is winding down, three years after raising US$33 million (AU$46.86 million) from investors led by a16z and Greenoaks, and will open-source most of its technology along with its Pirate Nation assets.
Chief executive Amitt Mahajan, who co-created FarmVille, co-founded the studio behind Pirate Nation.
The company said it could not build a product or a sustainable business that proved its central thesis: that blockchain games could help create a decentralised internet. The seed round closed in September 2023.
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Proof of Play published the Pirate Nation Unity client on GitHub on 17 June, seven weeks before it announced the wind-down, describing it as an open-source archival release. Company-authored code carries an MIT licence, and the release was published with a single-commit history and every secret removed and rotated.
A repository of the game’s artwork followed on 31 July under a CC0 licence, which waives copyright entirely, and was last updated on 3 August, the day before the announcement.
The Founder Pirates artwork, the branding and the wider Pirate Nation intellectual property are covered by the same terms, and the smart contracts have been public since February 2024.
The client does not build without work: paid third-party assets were stripped out, and no live backend remains for it to connect to. “The game is no longer operated as a live service, and we are open-sourcing the client to give it back to the community,” the company wrote.
What Happens to PIRATE
Pirate Nation itself closed a year ago. Proof of Play said on 19 August 2025 that gameplay and token rewards would end within 30 days and that the game’s Apex and Boss chains would sunset, because “the game has not attracted enough of an audience to justify continued investment and operation.”
The independent Pirate Nation Foundation will keep supporting PIRATE, which launched in June 2024. The token traded at US$0.0012 (AU$0.0017) early on Thursday for a market capitalisation of about US$884,000 (AU$1.26 million), 99.74% below the high of US$0.4757 (AU$0.6755) it reached on 18 July 2024. Shiba Story Go!, the studio’s other game, has been sold to a buyer it did not name.
Australian studio Immutable cut 29 roles and scaled back its own game development in June, moving Guild of Guardians to maintenance mode, and a16z-backed custody startup Entropy shut down and returned capital to investors in January, after crypto venture deal count fell about 60% in 2025 to roughly 1,200 transactions.
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