Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

AUTHORS

Pirate Nation Foundation
Proof of Play

June 2024
Version 1.1
As a fast-growing and fast-improving game, Pirate Nation will evolve beyond plans presented
within this litepaper. The purpose of this document is to share the design principles and thinking
around the game’s economy and future ecosystem.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Contents
1

Introduction

3

A Fully Onchain Game

6

Gameplay13

Art: A Voxel World

14

Founder’s Pirates

17

Open Game Economy

21

Roadmap25

Modding & UGC

27$PIRATE Utility

29$PIRATE Tokenomics

32$PIRATE Staking

35

Infrastructure

37

Future Games

38

About Us

42

Conclusion

43

Appendix

Welcome to Pirate Nation
A Bold Prediction

A fun and familiar experience for all ages
More than just another voxel gameThe premier asset in our ecosystem
Unparalleled levels of transparency

We like to ship fast, often, and in public
Introducing a truly permissionless platform
An integral piece of the future of Pirate Nation
How we aim to empower the community
Recognizing and rewarding early participants
Our proprietary onchain technology stackLooking ahead...

The team behind both Pirate Nation and Proof of Play

Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Introduction
Pirate Nation is a fully onchain free-to-play pirate-themed roleplaying game (RPG) live on Proof of Play’s Apex chain.
Pirate Nation is developed by Proof of Play,a game studio and technology company
building decentralized games and gaming
infrastructure. The game leverages Proof ofPlay’s proprietary Web3 game infrastructure
platform.

Players assemble their crews, build theirships, explore the Infinite Isles, search fortreasure, level up, battle fantastic creatures,compete with other players to top theleaderboards, and more. The game aims todefine the next wave of casual gaming on
mobile, with a fun and engaging FOCG (fully

Pirate Nation’s creators include the founding
developers of FarmVille along with key
team members from Epic Games, Zynga, EA,
Activision, and Riot Games.

onchain game) that allows players to earn,
spend, create, and share.
Pirate Nation can currently be played on
desktop browsers, with plans to launch on

The team is supported by a16z, Greenoaks,
and other investors including leadership
across Twitch, Coinbase, Anchorage Digital,
Mercury, Firebase, and Alchemy. More details
about the Proof of Play team can be foundlater in this litepaper.

mobile (iOS and Android) in the future.
The roadmap for the game is informed
by, and updated live for the community
on a regular basis. Since its launch in early
December 2022, the game has seen morethan 75 official updates, averaging roughly 1game update per week. Through this processof open & continuous development, we haveearned our player’s trust while building &improving features they’ve asked for. Our
ambition is for Pirate Nation to truly feel like
a community-owned game.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Our mission at Proof of Playis to create fun, accessible
onchain games and, in theprocess, develop novel
technology that makes
onchain game development
easier for everyone.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Pirate Nation is a Fully Onchain GameTo make a bold prediction: we believe it will be eventually fasterand more efficient to make games onchain rather than offchain.
The time and capital cost of not having
to run your own servers or worry about
security while benefiting from collective,
open-sourced packages and modules will let
developers ship faster than ever before.

That said, players just want to play fungames. They do not care if their favorite
game is on AWS or Ethereum. Unfortunately,
many blockchain products are currently
perceived as complicated or requiring
expensive purchases to begin playing.

As well as being our flagship game, Pirate
Nation is also our proof of concept and thecenterpiece in our go-to-market strategy.
Through the process of making Pirate Nationa success, we will inform and validate the fully
onchain gaming thesis, and bring interest andrelevance to Proof of Play’s infrastructure.

With this in mind, Proof of Play’s goal is tocreate fun, accessible games in which theunderlying technology is invisible to players.
By delivering a frictionless and free gaming
experience, we believe players will initiallyplay for enjoyment. Over time, they’ll discover
the benefits of onchain gaming as they delve
deeper into the universes they play andcreate in.

At the time of publishing this litepaper, thegame consists of over 300 smart contracts,
all game logic lives on chain, and our current
player base generates over 1M transactions
through in-game actions on Proof of Play’s
Apex chain every day. Throughout much of
Pirate Nation’s first Season, Apex has ranked
within the top 3 EVM based L2’s / rollups fortransactions per second (TPS) and gas per
second (MGas/s).

As our first game, Pirate Nation is oursandbox. Building Pirate Nation allows us toaddress hard problems head-on that we needto solve to bring onchain games to everyone
on every device.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

A Fully Onchain Game

What It Means To Be
Fully Onchain

Onchain games are permanent

A fully onchain game is a game that

do not own their in-game items or the utility

completely runs on and has all of its data on abehind them; it doesn’t matter if they earned

decentralized blockchain. Fully onchain games

them, paid for them, or were gifted them by

do not use centralized servers. Instead, aother players. Once the company decides to

network of decentralized nodes handles theshut down the game and stop paying their

In traditional server-based games, players

server costs, the virtual items, and the ability

game’s logic and history and ensures that
players are making valid moves.

to use those items within gameplay, are gone.

Games that are onchain are therefore more

Onchain games areextensible by anyone

secure, more resilient (they last as long as
their blockchain is around), and are infinitely

Being able to build on top of, and remix, an

extensible by anyone.

existing game takes the daunting task ofcreating a new universe and simplifies it,

It’s also worth drawing a distinction between

making it accessible for anyone to be able toonchain games and other types of blockchain

create gameplay. As games have moved fromgames. Many other blockchain games aredownloadable software to services, however,normal games that replace their optional

the ability for players to modify games

downloadable content (DLC) or in-app

has become gated by centralized, siloed,purchases with NFTs. So instead of buying

databases and a lack of data portability.

an item with a credit card that is then in a
database, players are buying NFTs that are
stored on a blockchain.

Onchain is the next
evolution in gaming

In these games the game servers andBy putting both source code and data

continued operation of the game is stillonchain, we’re creating a foundation for

dependent on the game creator, a centralized

future games and communities to be built.

entity. It’s like players paying for and owning

In the blockchain ecosystem, this is known

the pieces of a chess set but still having

as composability and it’s a powerful concept

to use the board and rulebook of the set

that allows applications to leverage eachmanufacturer.

other’s technical developments to build

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

A Fully Onchain Gamefaster. In games, this supercharges creativity
and creates a positive-sum environment
for creators to quickly remix or enhanceeach other’s games. At scale, you have an
exponential growth of creativity. This is a newparadigm for game development.
The fully onchain gaming ecosystem is still
very young, with the total lifetime amount ofinstitutional / VC funding deployed towards
FOCG estimated to be under $200m. Contrast
this against the gaming sector as a whole(which saw $4.1bn raised in 2023, and $14.6bn
raised in 2022) and it becomes clear how
incredibly early we are to this new frontier¹.
We are motivated by the opportunity ofleading it, and for Pirate Nation to seize its
potential as an innovative, novel, and genredefining title.

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Pirate Nation Foundation LitepaperCore Loop

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Gameplay
Pirate Nation is a fun and familiar-feeling game that’s easy tostart playing for both casual & experienced gamers of all ages.

The game’s controls are simple, and havealready been optimized in places (such as cardswiping) for mobile.

As a player collects items through quests andbounties, they’re able to construct and, later,level up their ships. Better ships are desirable
to compete in the game’s card-based combat
system, which includes a PvE mode known as‘The Gauntlet’, and a PvP mode, currently inearly access. Completing The Gauntlet allows
the player to level up their account-level
Command Rank.

The core gameplay loop requires players tospend energy (which currently replenishes
over a 24 hour timer) in order to send their
Pirate on quests, or to harvest resourcesfrom our open, procedurally generated
world, through exploration. In both cases,
the player’s Pirate earns XP that contributes
towards leveling up.

Once a player has reached Command Rank
10, their accounts become fully unlocked for
trading, which allows them to export / sellitems they’ve earned in the game.

As a Pirate levels up, they unlock newcombat cards, and are able to go on morelucrative bounties (a type of long-form quest,
potentially yielding rarer items).

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Gameplay

CombatAP & HP stats. Upgrading a ship introduces
new playable cards when using that ship, andincreases its HP.

Pirate Nation’s card-based combat leverages
two stats associated with the player’s
Pirate: elemental affinities and expertise to
introduce player choice and card variationin each combat encounter. There are fiveelemental affinities (fire, earth, lightning,
air, water), each one is each strong against,
and weak against, one of the others. There
are five types of expertise (accuracy, speed,
damage, evasion, and health) each carrying
different cards, allowing for different playstyles.

There will later be a system introducing ship
repairs to the game.
Under the hood of Pirate Nation’s combat
system is the PvP Protocol, enabling realtime decentralized gameplay in PvP matches.
More about Proof of Play’s technology can befound later in this litepaper.

Additionally, each of the 4 different ship types(skiff, sloop, galleon, frigate) have different

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Gameplay

Settlement Buildings

More settlement buildings will be introduced
to the game over time. They will play aparticularly interesting and synergistic rolewith another future feature - guilds - asbuilding owners will be able to restrict accessonly for fellow guild members, and/or set
discounts for them.

Settlement buildings are expensive to craft“player owned businesses” in the game, suchas the Shipwright. Once constructed andplaced on a player’s island, the building can(optionally) be set as available for visiting
players to use, at a cost determined by theowner.

Global Events
A global event system exists in Pirate Nation,and has so far been used twice: for the
first World Boss event, where Bruce theMegalodon was defeated, and secondly for
Forgotten Gods, a team-coordination based
event, with surprise twists & turns in social
deceptive & incentives, where team Broseph
defeated Old Salt & The Dealer.

In the specific case of the Shipwright, thebuilding is used to upgrade Ships, by merging
two lower level ones to produce a higher
level one. Some of the resources required to
do this are burned, and some get paid to theowner of the Shipwright.
Settlement buildings add another surface
to the player economy, where in addition
to trading resources and items, players
can construct a building at significant cost,which in time can break-even against its
own material cost, and produce net positive‘resource yield’ for the owner.

More events like these will be run in the
future, introducing new enemies, newmechanics, and new incentives, leveraging thebest of blockchain technology, and culture.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Gameplay

Gacha & The Wishing Well

Player Motivations

The game contains several different gacha
experiences, ranging from simple chests
obtained via completing The Gauntlet, to themore exciting and interactive Wishing Well,
which is open for limited periods of time.
In the first Wishing Well event, Founder’sPirates, exclusive skin shards, and otherlucrative prizes could be won by depositing
Worn Copper Coins (an item with a rare drop
chance from certain quests & bounties) into
the Well. The Wishing Well will reopen in the
future, and more gacha experiences may later
be introduced to other parts of the game.

The game’s core loop caters to three different
but intertwined player motivations:
1. Skullduggery
Combat-based gameplay
2. Exploration
Discovery-based gameplay
3. Privateering
Trade-based gameplay
Some players will bias towards some of thesemotivations over others.

All randomness in the game is determinedverifiably onchain, presenting another niceadvantage over web2 games where player
trust is required on the fairness of drop
chances and RNG.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Gameplay

Fully onchain gameplay,with upgradability

Gameplay Summary
Details of Pirate Nation’s gameplay features& systems are kept up to date in the game’s
public docs.

All of Pirate Nation’s gameplay logic lives
onchain, in the form of smart contracts. The
game is still relatively young in terms of its
development and economy, and we’re keeping
a proverbial hand on the helm to ensure
gameplay remains fun, balanced, and bugfree as we scale the game. This is ensured
through contract upgradeability, allowing
us to introduce changes and improvements
based on data and player feedback.

Pirate Nation’s gameplay will, of course,
evolve and deepen over time, with theintroduction of new social collaboration
features like guilds. To date (inclusive of timeprior to the introduction of BOOTY Points)
the game has achieved strong retention, with
>65% of new players retained at D7. Our goal
through developing further gameplay, andoptimizing the first time user experience, isto protect this high retention rate as we scale
our player base over the months & years tocome.
Pirate Nation is free-to-play, and a demo
of our combat system can be experienced
on our website without any sign-in
requirements.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

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Art: A Voxel World
Pirate Nation’s in-game assets are composed of voxels – thethree-dimensional equivalent of pixels.
But our approach to voxels is different from thenorm: we leverage low-poly and pixel art aesthetics
to create a distinctive look & feel, establishing thestyle of a wider voxel world which the game, andfuture games within the Proof of Play ecosystem, can
expand into.
Since the game’s launch we’ve continuously optimized
the compression & rendering of voxel assets in Pirate
Nation. The purpose of this effort is so that Pirate
Nation’s game assets - characters, buildings, items
and so on, can be high fidelity without causing a strainon graphic processing. This is important both today,
but also in the future when we launch our mobile
app(s), so that Pirate Nation remains an aesthetically
impressive, yet highly performant game, across all
platforms.
The final and perhaps most important benefit of ourapproach to art & world design is that the learning
curve for voxel assets & art creation is very beginner
friendly. This is relevant when considering our plans toencourage, empower, and reward the creation of UGC.
We anticipate both novice and experienced creators
alike to have a go at creating assets for Pirate Nation.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Founder’s Pirates are
the premier asset in the
Pirate Nation & Proof
of Play ecosystem.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Founder’s Pirates
In November 2022, we released a free to mint genesis collectionof 9,999 Founder’s Pirates NFTs (referred to as ‘Gen0’).

Initially, these Founder’s Pirates acted as a gating mechanism to the game: players had to own atleast one Founder’s Pirate to access & play Pirate Nation.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Founder’s Pirates

Expansion Without Dilution
In order to start growing our player base, we implemented a solution for new players to enter thegame, without diluting the collection or special nature of Founder’s Pirates. We did this throughthe creation of a separate, soulbound collection of Pirates (referred to as ‘Gen1’), which would
allow players to enter the game for free, without impacting the supply or the provenance ofFounder’s Pirates.
The system works: Founder’s Pirates have not only retained but increased in value, and over
100,000+ Pirates have been minted by new incoming players, who are now able to play the gamewithout owning a Founder’s Pirate.

Founder’s Pirates Benefits
Founder’s Pirates are the premier asset in the Pirate Nation & Proof of Play ecosystem. They canbe thought of as a premium collectible, and carry benefits both in Pirate Nation (such as exclusive
quests & bounties) and our wider ecosystem (such as early access to future games).
We will continue to recognize their special nature as Pirate Nation evolves.

Founder’s Pirates Staking MultiplierFounder’s Pirates can be staked, along with $PIRATE tokens, to add an additional multiplier to thenumber of Proof of Play Points being accrued through staking. The staking mechanism here is‘soft’, in the sense that a player only needs to hold Founder’s Pirates in their wallet for them to be
detected and for the multiplier to come into effect. Founder’s Pirates that are considered staked
and actively earning points can still be used in game.
More about staking, and Proof of Play Points, can be found later in this litepaper.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

As a fully onchain game,
Pirate Nation’s economy
is open & transparent bydefault. All circulating
resources and items,
and any live trades, areall visible onchain.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Open Game Economy
The game’s public economy dashboard has been live for over a year and can be used to track the
production and expenditure of various resources & items.
PGLD & Marks

A game economy that is open & transparent like this enables unparalleled levels of information
symmetry between us as developers and our players. It also ensures all players have access to thesame information at the same time, facilitating an open and fair secondary market for resources
and items being earned, traded or burned in the game. This aspect is in part what makes the
economic meta game around Pirate Nation particularly compelling.
We believe an open economy like this ultimately leads to a more efficient market for game items,
and helps mitigate some of the issues encountered by the first generation of web3 games, inparticular those who positioned themselves as P2E.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Open Game Economy

Controls
While it’s still relatively early days for Pirate Nation, it’s important that the game’s economy
includes controls to calibrate the rate at which new players can progress through the game, earn
the right to trade, and so on. Pirate Nation has a handful of simple controls, including:
EnergyCurrently, players have 150 energy per 24 hour cycle. They can top this up a small
amount through the consumption of Rum (an item earned through gameplay),or through the purchase of Gems. We have the option to calibrate the amount ofenergy, the rate at which it replenishes, along with how much rum or how many
gems can be consumed at any given time.
Trade License System
Currently, new players are unable to sell or transfer items they earn, until they reachCommand Rank 10 in the game, and unlock trading on their account. We have theoption to calibrate the rate at which players level up their Command Rank, or theCommand Rank at which the Trade License is earned.
Soulbound Items
Currently, some earned items in the game, such as High Seas Maps, are soulbound,meaning a player cannot purchase or trade their way to owning more. We have theoption to introduce more soulbound items as & when necessary, as well as create
conditions or criteria under which an item can become un-soulbound.
Drop Rates
Drop rates for items can be changed.
Burn Rates / Crafting Requirements
Crafting requirements for items can be changed.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Open Game Economy

The Pirate Nation economy is made up of 3 different currencies,
seamlessly working together to incentivize gameplay, enable
free-to-play, and accrue value to the token as the game’s playerbase grows.
Pirate Gold

Gems

Soft Currency

Hard Currency

Pirate Nation’s in-game soft currency. Players
earn and spend this throughout the game ina variety of player progression loops. $PGLD
can be crafted into a Stockpile of Gold, whichburns ~10% of the $PGLD, and then it can besold from one player to another on the Proof
of Play Marketplace.

Pirate Nation’s in-game hard, nontransferable currency. At launch, Gems will
only be purchasable using $PIRATE. Gems canbe used in several ways:

New players to Pirate Nation, who haven’t
yet reached Command Rank 10, earn Marks
instead of $PGLD, which are untransferable.
Once they reach Command Rank 10 and
unlock trading, their Marks automaticallyconvert to $PGLD.

•

Purchasing additional energy•

Speeding up timers on certain quests•

Topping off questing & crafting
prerequisites$PIRATEToken
An ERC-20 token on Ethereum Mainnet.
$PIRATE is convertible to Gems and isrequired for many other exclusive gamefeatures that add depth, connection,
creativity, and fun to a Pirate’s life.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Pirate Nation has been
built in public since thegame’s launch, with on
average one game update
shipped every week.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Roadmap

We like to ship fast, and to ship often – this allows us to launch
new features, and improvements, on a continuous incremental
basis, and receive feedback and data as soon as they are live.
We believe in the massive opportunity ofbuilding closely alongside our community, andwork in the open to empower them with realtime visibility and context on what’s coming
next.

that are submitted by the community. Any
player can submit a suggestion, and otherplayers are able to upvote suggestions theylike. All submitted suggestions are reviewed
by our product, game design, and community
team during a weekly community triage.

The Pirate Nation public roadmap is kept
up to date by our product team. The live
Notion page can be publicly commented on,
and its contents are openly discussed in the
Pirate Nation Discord. Prioritization of gameNew gameplay features and any
accompanying incentives & mechanics willalign with Seasons, timeboxed periods during
which players can compete on leaderboards

features and improvements is informed
through game data, as well as suggestions

to earn BOOTY Points, and receive rewards inthe form of $PIRATE and other prizes.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Roadmap

Season 1
BOOTY Points x Gameplay
In Season 1, we rewarded BOOTY Points for a series of gameplay quests (inparticular: The Gauntlet), social quests, and for collecting & holding various gameassets, with most points and a multiplier attributed for holding Founder’s Pirates.

Season 2
BOOTY Points x Gameplay
Season 2 will occur after $PIRATE’s token generating event (TGE). It will include$PIRATE prize pools and an emphasis on increasing player-ownership in the game’s
economy, through the launch of new in-game buildings players can craft in order to
upgrade and sell goods & services to other players in the game.
Non-gameplay quests will also be added to this Season.
Our goals in Season 2 include (1) ensuring the successful introduction of $PIRATE to
the game economy, (2) leveraging $PIRATE’s utility to deepen the player experienceand enable exciting new options and mechanics, while (3) retaining & growing the
game’s daily active users.

Season 3
BOOTY Points x Gameplay
Details of Season 3 & beyond will be shared with our community once Season 2 isunderway or close to its conclusion. It will likely focus on new game features, alongwith empowering mods & UGC for the game, to foster a community of creators anddevelopers around the game.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Roadmap

A key theme for our onwards gamedevelopment, likely to be seen throughout
all seasons, is an emphasis on social
collaborative and competitive gameplay,
aimed at making Pirate Nation an even more
fun experience with friends, and deepening
community engagement.

improvements to existing ones. We consider
this agility & dynamism fundamental to our
growth as it allows us to reprioritize items
and plans in real time based on feedback,data, and the emergence of new ideas andtechnologies. This is much in line with how
we’ve operated to date, and so the goodnews for our community is: Pirate Nation’s
development will follow the same formula
you’ve supported since our launch.

The best outcomes are achieved when both
we and our community remain agile to thesequencing of new game features, and24

Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Pirate Nation is natively
moddable, meaning no API
or creator suite is needed
to enable modding, as
all game logic & data ispublicly available onchain.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Modding & UGC
Pirate Nation is a permissionless platform for players anddevelopers to build on, extend, or remix as they like.
Over the last 30 years in gaming, players
have shown a growing appetite to interact
with, consume and purchase User Generated
Content (UGC), which has become a significant
revenue stream for both creators, and gamedevelopers. And it’s growing fast: net UGCgames developer payouts rose from $1B in FY
22 to $1.32B in FY 23.

To seize the potential in building a fully
onchain like Pirate Nation, we will lean in to
support and enable modding & UGC from thecommunity. Our V1 dev docs are already live,
along with an active developer chat in our
official Discord server.
Where a fully onchain game can likely do UGC
enablement better than traditional ‘web2’
game studios and publishers, comes down toboth the technology & transparency of theAcross the gaming industry, UGC has seen
significant support from large publishers andgames. For example, Epic has allocated 40%
of Fornite’s net revenue (estimated at $1B) toan engagement pool for creators⁴.

blockchain to reward creators, as well as theculture and ownership ethos of the onchain
ecosystem.

The benefits of UGC are numerous, including:Some early projects & tools that have been
built by the Pirate Nation community include
player quests, a directory of player-owned
Shipwright buildings, gauntlet racing, a Pirate
pose / meme maker, and more.

1. Increased player engagement
and ownership
2. Reduction in live service
operating costs

We will be showcasing such projects inthe months ahead, along with detailsof a $PIRATE grant-application process
for developers who wish to build in our
ecosystem.

3. Extension of the longevity of
the game

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper$PIRATE Utility$PIRATE is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum Mainnet and one of
the first uses of the $PIRATE token is to serve as a utility token
for Pirate Nation.

$PIRATE will be convertible to Gems (a non-transferrable in-game currency).
Gems are Pirate Nation’s in-game hard currency, and gems utilities are $PIRATE sinks. Gems canonly be purchased using $PIRATE, and will be used for a number of gameplay-enhancing benefits,
such as:•Purchasing additional energy•

Speeding up timers on certain quests•

Topping off questing & crafting prerequisites•

Participating in certain game modes and events, and more

Gems go live in Pirate Nation at or shortly after $PIRATE’s TGE.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper$PIRATE Utility

Additional $PIRATE
in-game utility
Over time $PIRATE may be used for all sortsof fun and functional activities within thegame, expanding the possibilities of players
and guilds in crafting and customization, andproviding access to exclusive tournaments
and unique game modes or events. Whensignificant new choices, items, or dynamics
are added to the game (examples: larger
player islands, able to accommodate newsettlement buildings, or new types of bidding/ special auction events for premier, uniquegame assets), $PIRATE may be used as thenecessary currency to enable said new
dynamic.

•

By completing onchain and offchain quests•

By competing in tournaments
and leaderboards•

By establishing and growing
their guild•

By building on top of the gameecosystem•

Earning sought-after
achievements in-game$PIRATE rewards for such actions may be
set directly, or represented through tasks &quests during an active season.
$PIRATE will play an integral role in the
future of Pirate Nation, and the larger
Proof of Play ecosystem. Increasing
its utility within the game ecosystem,
will remain at the forefront of design
choices we make in upcoming features.

The single most important design principle of
the $PIRATE token is ensuring Pirate Nation ismade better, and more engaging, through its
existence. It’s with this in mind that we will
design, optimize, and evolve its uses and sinks
within Pirate Nation.

$PIRATE Incentives
The $PIRATE incentive system has been
designed to encourage players to play thegame and engage in our ecosystem. Acrossfuture seasons, players will be able to earn
$PIRATE in a variety of ways. Examples of thismay include:

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper$PIRATE Tokenomics$PIRATE’s supply is 1,000,000,000 tokens and its TGE is scheduled for June 13, 2024.
The majority of tokens (>60%) are allocated towards the community, and ecosystem pools. Our
goal with this distribution of tokens is to empower our players, and for our community to be thelargest recipients of $PIRATE rewards.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper$PIRATE Tokenomics

Unlock schedule
At the time of launch, only a portion of the community & ecosystem allocations will be unlocked,
amounting to 21.40% & 5.15% of the total $PIRATE supply, respectively.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper$PIRATE Tokenomics

The remainder will unlock over the following
36 months. Allocations for the Pirate Nation
Team, Investors, and Advisors, are held to a
12 month cliff post TGE, and then subject tolinear monthly vesting over a further periodof 24 months, also totalling 36 months.

ecosystem proposal process and $PIRATE
grant eligibility, will likely be announced
during Season 2.

Pre-saleNo “pre-sales”, “insider sales”, or any
similar practices that are common forweb3 gaming token launches havebeen conducted for $PIRATE.

At TGE, 15% of the total token supply will beclaimable by the Pirate Nation community,
who participated in Preseason & Season 1.
The remainder of unlocked supply for the

The only people able to claim $PIRATE tokens
at TGE are eligible community members andplayers who participated in Preseason andSeason 1. Although pre-sales are popularamong web3 games, our decision to avoid
a pre-sale was deliberate: Proof of Play iscommunity will be held, at a minimum, until
Season 2.

Ecosystem allocation
The use of ecosystem tokens will span arange of strategic growth and marketing
initiatives, from exchange liquidity, torewards for creators and builders within
our ecosystem, and more. Details on thewell capitalized and we want to ensure ourcommunity playing the game are the only
ones to receive $PIRATE at TGE.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper$PIRATE Staking

At the time of its launch, players will be able to stake $PIRATE to earn Proof of Play Points, whichhold a role in recognizing and rewarding early supporters & participants in the Proof of Playecosystem.
Immediate staking at the time of claim is incentivized with a +50% multiplier. Early staking is also
incentivized, with large multipliers that can be locked in by staking soon after the TGE date.
Long term staking is encouraged by keeping the multiplier in place for all Proof of Play Points
accrued, until a withdrawal happens.
If you unstake your $PIRATE tokens, you will lose your full staking multiplier andwhatever remains staked will reset to the current and active multiplier.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper$PIRATE Staking

Use and spend $PIRATE
while staked

In addition to staking $PIRATE, token holders
can also stake Founder’s Pirates NFTs toreceive an additional amount of Proof ofPlay Points each day. If you sell the Founder’sPirates NFT, you will lose all Proof of Playpoints that have been accumulated by it.

As $PIRATE will have growing in-game utility
in Pirate Nation, we’ve developed a novel
system where stakers will still be able to use
and spend their staked $PIRATE within our
ecosystem, without affecting their multiplier.
It will be possible for stakers to “spend-fromstake” in a single transaction without having
to unstake any tokens to do so.

The primary purpose of staking is to earn
Proof of Play Points. Details about these
Points and their accompanying reward(s) will
be revealed later.

Discounts on purchaseswith $PIRATE$PIRATE stakers will also be recognized &prioritized in other opportunities arisingduring the staking period.

As an additional bonus for stakers, purchases
made in the Pirate Nation ecosystem using
staked $PIRATE (e.g. Gems or other items) will
receive a discount.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper$PIRATE can be staked toearn Proof of Play Points,
which recognize andreward early supporters& participants in the Proof
of Play ecosystem.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Infrastructure
Pirate Nation runs on Proof of Play’s proprietary onchain
infrastructure stack, which includes:
Multichain

Token Mirroring

An ultra fast, constellation ofblockchains (<250ms tx speed),capable of reaching internetscale 100m+ players, while being
gas efficient and set up to saveengineering time.

A solution for assets on one
chain to be recognized andusable on another without theneed for any bridging, allowing
game items or assets to work
seamlessly across chains.

Onchain Game Engine

Verifiable Randomness Function (VRF)

A game engine comprising
hundreds of modular smart
contracts, including coregame systems which can be
configured to power otheronchain games.

A game-optimized onchain
randomization solution, fasterand cheaper than well known,mainstream alternatives.
Custom Forwarder
Built to cover player gas fees,with the option to impose a gas
tax on bots.

Game Wallet
A secondary, locally stored gamewallet limited only to defined
gameplay actions (without
holding funds or assets),
enabling completely signless &gasless gameplay for players.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Infrastructure

ECS / Editor

Marketplace

A no-code entity component
system and accompanying
content management system,
allowing non-engineers to add
or edit game data.

A dedicated P2P marketplace
for players, with multiple
payment methods including
fiat (pay with credit card) andcrypto, and potential to beembedded directly within thegame itself.

PvP Protocol
Enabling real-time onchain PvP
with validation.

To summarize the importance and capability of Proof of Play’s infrastructure: Pirate Nation would
simply not run as it does today without it.
The development of Pirate Nation has informed the design of Proof of Play’s infrastructure, andhas been a forcing function for us to optimize for both performance and scale. While the primary
application for our technology is games, much of what Proof of Play is building will be of interest
to other high-usage / large-data onchain applications.

Decentralization of our infrastructure, consensus / validation and incentive design are
key focus areas for Proof of Play over the months ahead.
More news, updates, and announcements about our infrastructure will follow
throughout the rest of the year.

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Future Games
Proof of Play’s focus is entirely on making Pirate Nation a
success. However...
...there will eventually be other games we build within our ecosystem, leveraging the learnings
and tech built to power Pirate Nation. In this sense, Pirate Nation can be thought of as atemplate—one that is important to get right before applying to other games.
It’s likely that any future game we develop will (a) uphold the same design principles as Pirate
Nation (namely fun & accessibility) and (b) interact with or have some form of plausible tie-in
with Pirate Nation.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Pirate Nation is being built
by the team at Proof of Play.
The team includes veteranlevel professionals
with backgrounds ingaming, blockchain,infrastructure, payments,and marketplaces.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

About Us: Team & Investors
Team members have operated at both ends of the spectrum: from founding startups (halfof team Proof of Play are former founders) all the way up to the senior & executive levels at
industry leading, publicly traded companies. It’s this blend & range of expertise that gives Proof
of Play an edge in fully onchain gaming.

Amitt Mahajan, CEO
https://www.linkedin.com/in/amittmahajan
Prior to founding Proof of Play, Amitt was the founder and CTO of MyMiniLife(acquired by Zynga), founder and CEO of Toro (acquired by Google), and the cofounder and CTO of Rare Bits, an NFT marketplace launched in 2018 the same week
as OpenSea. While at Zynga, he co-created the game FarmVille (300M players, $1B+
in revenue) and served as the CTO of Zynga Japan. Before his entrepreneurial work,
Mahajan was an engineer at Epic Games on the Unreal Engine and Gears of War.

Matt Van, Head of Engineeringhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mattvv
Matt is a core gamer and serial entrepreneur. Prior to Proof of Play he founded
and grew Optic Power from 2 people to 350 people as a remote-first engineering
company focusing on Gaming and Blockchain working with top Esports teams (100Thieves, TSM) and Gaming IP (Star Trek, League of Legends). Before that, he wasa Tech Lead at Riot Games’s Esports Engineering team on League of Legends andValorant. He was also an early employee of multiple startups, including co-founding
Washio, CTO of Ringadoc (Acquired by Practice Fusion), CTO of Brand Reporter(Acquired by YPB) and Telesign (Acquired by BICS).

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

About Us

Adam Fern, Product Lead - Platform
https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-fern
Adam is a tech veteran who was on the founding team of Cash App and the Headof Product at Square Loans. In addition to holding many growth and partnershipleadership roles in fintech over the past decade, he is a crypto OG having led theintegration of Bitcoin payments into an ecommerce platform in 2013 and consulted
for Circle Financial Group (USDC) in 2014 on their risk & fraud strategy.

William Schmitt, Head of Studiohttps://www.linkedin.com/in/wschmitt
William has over 30 years of experience running studios and leading teams at
companies such as Scopely, Disney, Activision, and Electronic Arts, working on $100+
million titles like WWE Champions, Marvel Avengers Alliance, Spider-Man III, Madden
Football, South Park: Stick of Truth, and Darksiders II. Alongside the billions inrevenue generated at several industry-leading publishers, he has also spearheaded
multiple development studios, including founding his own in 1998 where he shipped
9 titles, including Tetris Worlds, Road Rash, and Disney’s Atlantis.

Dith, BD & Marketing Leadhttps://x.com/0xDith
Dith is a lifelong gamer and former startup founder who prior to joining Proof
of Play, led a GTM function generating over $1B in annual revenue at Stripe. The
startup he founded prior to his time at Stripe, served Fortune-500 customers incl.
Apple, Samsung, MasterCard, Microsoft, SAP, and Coca-Cola. Since 2021 Dith has
actively advised a number of blockchain & web3 teams & projects on go-to-market,
partnership, marketing & growth strategies. Dith holds an MBA from a top businessschool and has spoken at TEDx as well as other leading conferences.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

About Us

Matt Anderson, Product Lead - Game
https://www.linkedin.com/in/teppermatthewanderson
Matthew is a former professional gamer (Warcraft III) who started his career
working as a product manager at Google working on Google+. From there, heconquered the mobile space as a product leader who has led teams on mobile
games that have grossed >$4B including hits such as Call of Duty Mobile, Marvel
Strike Force, and Disney Emoji Blitz. His most recent position prior to Proof of Playwas Director of Product at WB games where he worked with third party developers
on WB IP games.

Aaron B. Murray, Senior Art Director
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronbmurray
Aaron is a creative with 19 years of experience in video games, VR/AR, and web3.
His work spans a broad range of genres and platforms. After years of working on
high-profile titles at Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, Aaron helped develop The VOID’s
innovative approach to fully-immersive, location-based entertainment on titles
like Ghostbusters and Star Wars. He co-founded Strange Reptile, where he worked
closely with partners like Netflix, Universal, and Dave & Buster’s in developing
experiences based on high-profile IP like Star Trek, Men In Black, and The Terminator,
before creating the Guild of Guardians IP at Immutable.

Investors
We have raised $33m in equity funding from a16z (Chris Dixon & Josh Lu, at a16z
crypto and a16z games, respectively), Greenoaks (Neil Mehta), and many incredibleangels and founders, including Balaji Srinivasan (former CTO of Coinbase), Diogo
Monica (CEO of Anchorage Digital), Justin Kan (Cofounder of Twitch), Justin Waldron(Cofounder of Zynga, CEO of PlayCo), Nikil Viswanathan (CEO of Alchemy), Immad
Akhund (CEO of Mercury), Gabby Dizon (CEO of YGG), Naval Ravikant (Cofounder ofAngelList), and many more.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Conclusion
Pirate Nation is a fun, engaging game that looks & feels like amass-market web2 game, while being fully onchain at the sametime, and benefiting from all the unique elements that makeweb3 games sticky.
Players have ownership over the items they earn or purchase, and are able to trade them freely
once they reach an in-game milestone. Players and developers are able to permissionlessly build
on top of the game, encouraging new forms of gameplay and meta-games that extend the player
experience and ecosystem around the game.
Pirate Nation is free-to-play and has become the largest, and fastest-growing fully onchain
game. Powering Pirate Nation is a proprietary infrastructure stack and game engine being built by
Proof of Play. Pirate Nation players and supporters of Proof of Play’s efforts can accrue Proof ofPlay Points by staking their $PIRATE tokens and Founder’s Pirates NFTs.
Proof of Play will continue to develop & grow Pirate Nation hand in hand with our community, andcontinue to uphold the mantra:

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Appendix

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Appendix

MobileFrom the outset, Pirate Nation has been built with the goal of not only supporting mobile, butultimately becoming a mobile-first game. This is reflected in decisions like choosing Unity as ourfront end game engine, so that launching our mobile app will be easy. The reason the game didn’t
launch on mobile to begin with, is because historically fully onchain UX hasn’t played well withmobile - it certainly didn’t when Pirate Nation launched in late 2022. This has changed over thecourse of the last 18 months. The game is also now much further along and is more appealing to,
and capable of retaining, non-web3 natives who can be acquired via established mobile marketing
channels.
Roughly 80% (2.7bn of 3.3bn) of total global gamers play on mobile devices⁵. Mobile games
accounted for 49% of total annual games revenue in 2023 (~$90bn of ~$184bn), versus just~$2bn generated by browser PC games. With a larger addressable market and far more economic
activity, Pirate Nation on mobile devices will allow us to reach more players, and grow the in-gameeconomy, with larger purchasing volumes between players.
More details about our mobile app, and potentially an early beta-testing program for Founder’sPirates holders, will be shared closer to the time of its launch.

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Appendix

Links & Resources
Websitehttps://piratenation.game/X
https://twitter.com/PirateNation
https://twitter.com/ProofOfPlay
https://twitter.com/PirateNationFDN
NFT collections
Founder’s Pirates Collection
Pirate Nation - Items Collection
Pirate Nation - Ships Collection
Documentation
https://docs.piratenation.game
Pirate Nation Game Roadmap
https://proofofplay.notion.site/proofofplay/Pirate-Nation-Public-Roadmap-9b8b
ea7259f84dd4b614c8cc19c0d8dd
Onchain Game Economy Metrics
https://ua.helika.io/dashboard/pop-external
Contracts
Founder’s Pirates Contract
0x1b41d54b3f8de13d58102c50d7431fd6aa1a2c48$PIRATE Contract
0x7613c48e0cd50e42dd9bf0f6c235063145f6f8dc$PIRATE Stake Contract
0x6759aCD57cB5EA451a3eDF397734eDDDFc123049$PIRATE Claim Contract
0x543ba3e063197b3025a4b2751e9b4b6a2489fa07

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Pirate Nation Foundation Litepaper

Appendix

References
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

https://venturebeat.com/games/games-vc-funding-plateau-72-yoy-decline-pitchbook
https://mirror.xyz/1kx.eth/v6HaPiqRvtC_qIeDnyhiC8ICjwtBdLiNhZh4vbqsW-s
https://www.paradigm.xyz/2023/08/onchain-games
https://naavik.co/deep-dives/state-of-ugc2024/
https://newzoo.com/resources/trend-reports/newzoo-global-games-market-report2023-free-version

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