In Brief:
- A post from the crypto gaming account @yellowpanther claims Proof of Play “will be ceasing operations.” No confirmation has come from the studio itself.
- September 2025 saw Proof of Play close Pirate Nation (official site), and the two co-founders closest to the game have both departed since. As of May 31, 2026, Tracxn puts the company’s headcount at two.
- PIRATE sits around $0.001277 — some 99.7% down from its record high — with a market cap below $1 million.
The crypto gaming account @yellowpanther says Proof of Play is ceasing operations. Yet the studio responsible for Pirate Nation has posted nothing about a shutdown across its own channels, and the claim has not been picked up by any other outlet.
The account tacked the assertion onto one of its own older posts — a video promoted as an “Exclusive Pirate Nation Alpha” featuring Amitt Mahajan, the FarmVille co-creator who co-founded Proof of Play and served as its CEO.
BREAKING: @ProofOfPlay will be ceasing operations
yellowpanther (prediction arc)View on X ↗
Mahajan has already exited. “I’ve recently left Proof of Play, the company I co-founded 4 years ago,” he wrote on LinkedIn, calling the decision a hard but right one.
What was left to close
Little of the company remained to unwind. Tracxn recorded a headcount of two at Proof of Play as of May 31, 2026. The studio was founded in New York in 2022 by Mahajan, Craig Woida and Mark Skaggs, and it raised $33 million in a seed round dated Sept. 22, 2023, with a16z and Greenoaks leading.
Adam Fern, co-founder and product lead, has also moved on. His X bio now reads head of product, DeFi at Robinhood.
The game went first
Pirate Nation revealed its own ending on Aug. 18, 2025, warning it would wind down “at earliest 30 days from today.” The fully onchain RPG went dark on Thursday, Sept. 18, 2025, and its pair of Arbitrum L3s, Apex and Boss, were retired on Sept. 25.
Peak daily active unique wallets of more than 100,000 had dropped to about 10,000. Keeping the game and the two chains running ran roughly $150,000 a month.
“The game has not attracted enough of an audience to justify continued investment and operation,” the studio said. Operating two chains, it added, “no longer makes sense from a dollars-and-cents business perspective.”
“While the business reasons for moving on may be sound, it doesn’t make the loss any easier for those who played, contributed, and believed in the project,” Mahajan wrote on X at the time.
Fern described the shutdown as “one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever been part of,” noting he had worked on the project almost daily for more than three years.
What holders got
Token withdrawals from Apex and Boss remained open to players until Sept. 18. In-game items were converted into Plunder Certificates through a two-week burn event, with those certificates redeemable for a later PIRATE allocation. The 10,000 Founder’s Pirates PFPs earned holders one last PIRATE distribution, and the NFTs then became community identity assets carrying no further token rewards. A $50 reimbursement went to some holders.
PIRATE debuted in June 2024 on the back of a play-to-earn season. CoinGecko now shows it near $0.001277, a market cap around $907,887 and roughly $169,478 in daily volume. Circulating supply stands at 718,019,546 out of a 1 billion cap, and the all-time high was $0.4757.
Grumbling followed the token’s final stretch under the old system. Qualifying for the Season 3 airdrop meant holding a VIP pass, and rewards vested across 180 days. Those terms saw over 10 million PIRATE burned — about 1% of total supply.
The Arcade is what’s left
What came after Pirate Nation was the Proof of Play Arcade, launched on Abstract on July 31, 2025, offering smaller modular games with the blockchain tucked out of sight. YGG Play came aboard as a publishing partner. According to Fern, the studio’s infrastructure would go on to power other products, among them a title called Shiba Story Go.
In the months leading up to the shutdown, Mahajan repeatedly criticised the very model the game was built on. “We’re done giving tokens away,” he said in July 2025, branding play-to-earn “fundamentally broken.” Fern said the mechanics had made playing feel like “a job.”
The Arcade remains online. One credit costs roughly 50 cents in ETH, and your first play is free.