Pirate Nation studio Proof of Play is ceasing operations, post says

In Brief:

• The crypto gaming account @yellowpanther posted that Proof of Play “will be ceasing operations.” The studio hasn’t confirmed it.
• Proof of Play shut Pirate Nation (official site) in September 2025, and both co-founders most tied to the game have since left. Tracxn lists the company at two employees as of May 31, 2026.
• PIRATE trades near $0.001277, roughly 99.7% below its all-time high, with a market cap under $1 million.

Proof of Play will cease operations, according to a post from the crypto gaming account @yellowpanther. But the studio behind Pirate Nation has published no shutdown notice on its own channels, and no other outlet has reported one.

The account attached the claim to one of its earlier posts, a video billed as an “Exclusive Pirate Nation Alpha” with Amitt Mahajan, the FarmVille co-creator who co-founded Proof of Play and ran it as CEO.

Mahajan is already gone. “I’ve recently left Proof of Play, the company I co-founded 4 years ago,” Mahajan wrote on LinkedIn, describing the move as difficult but correct.

What was left to close

There wasn’t much company left to wind down. Tracxn put Proof of Play’s headcount at two as of May 31, 2026. Mahajan, Craig Woida and Mark Skaggs founded the studio in New York in 2022 and raised $33 million in a seed round dated Sept. 22, 2023. a16z and Greenoaks led it.

Co-founder and product lead Adam Fern left too. Fern’s X bio now lists head of product, DeFi at Robinhood.

The game went first

Pirate Nation announced its own end on Aug. 18, 2025, saying it would close “at earliest 30 days from today.” The fully onchain RPG shut down Thursday, Sept. 18, 2025. Its two Arbitrum L3s, Apex and Boss, followed on Sept. 25.

Daily active unique wallets had fallen from more than 100,000 at peak to roughly 10,000. Running the game and both chains cost about $150,000 a month.

“The game has not attracted enough of an audience to justify continued investment and operation,” the studio said. 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 said on X at the time.

Fern called the closure “one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever been part of,” and said he had worked on it nearly every day for over three years.

What holders got

Players had until Sept. 18 to withdraw tokens from Apex and Boss. A two-week burn event converted in-game items into Plunder Certificates, redeemable for a later PIRATE allocation. Holders of the 10,000 Founder’s Pirates PFPs received a final PIRATE distribution, after which the NFTs became community identity assets with no further token rewards. Some holders were reimbursed $50.

PIRATE launched in June 2024 off a play-to-earn season. It now trades around $0.001277 with a market cap near $907,887 and about $169,478 in daily volume, per CoinGecko. Circulating supply is 718,019,546 against a 1 billion cap. The all-time high was $0.4757.

The token’s last stretch under the old model drew complaints. Season 3 required a VIP pass to qualify for the airdrop and vested rewards over 180 days. Those rules led to more than 10 million PIRATE being burned, roughly 1% of total supply.

The Arcade is what’s left

The pitch after Pirate Nation was the Proof of Play Arcade, which went live on Abstract on July 31, 2025, with smaller modular games and the blockchain pushed behind the scenes. YGG Play signed on as a publishing partner. Fern has said the studio’s infrastructure would power other products, including a title called Shiba Story Go.

Mahajan spent the months before the shutdown arguing against the model that built the game. “We’re done giving tokens away,” Mahajan said in July 2025, and called play-to-earn “fundamentally broken.” Fern said the mechanics had turned playing into “a job.”

The Arcade is still up. A credit runs about 50 cents in ETH, and the first play is free.