What is Pirate Nation?
Pirate Nation is an onchain pirate role-playing game developed by Proof of Play. It launched as a free-to-play RPG in which players assembled crews, built and crafted ships, explored the "Infinite Isles," harvested island resources using Energy, and fought card-based battles, with game state recorded onchain rather than on private servers. The genesis Founder's Pirates NFT collection lives on Ethereum, while gameplay itself ran on Proof of Play's own Apex and Boss chains. In August 2025 the studio announced it would sunset the original game — now referred to as Pirate Nation Classic — citing a decline from roughly 100,000 daily active users at peak to about 10,000 and the cost of operating both the game and its networks. Classic and the Apex and Boss chains have since closed.
How to play Pirate Nation
The game continues as Pirate Nation Arcade, a roguelite adapted from Classic's "Infinite Tides" mode and running on the Abstract chain. Players pick one of nine pirate captains, each with its own ship and base card set — for example Lady Lara's heavily armored Floating Fortress or Captain Hightide's speed-oriented Barbary Coast — then fight sequential waves of enemies using a single ship whose HP carries over between battles, adding one card to the deck from a randomly offered selection after each fight. The loop is buy credits, play runs, earn Abstract XP. The first play is free, and spending additional credits raises the score multiplier that drives leaderboard placement. Weekly leaderboards award cash prizes; the first week's Total Run Leaderboard winner received a Founder's Pirate.
Pirate Nation tokenomics & earning
$PIRATE is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum mainnet (contract 0x7613c48e0cd50e42dd9bf0f6c235063145f6f8dc) with a total supply of one billion and a token generation event on 13 June 2024. The published allocation is 47% community, 28% team, 13.25% ecosystem, and 11.75% investors and advisors. In Classic, $PIRATE converted into Gems, a non-transferable in-game hard currency, so Gem spending acted as a token sink. Proof of Play has stated its focus is now the token and the Arcade rather than the original RPG.