‘Twas The Night Before Mint

TL;DR

• If everyone on the Stowaway list tries to mint, there will likely be a gas war
• Making changes to the rules or contracts / site this close to launch is not prudent
• We’re doing our best to eliminate bots and seek out Sybil attackers on the list
• The mint is just one entry point into the Pirate Nation / Proof of Play universe, and not the last. If you don’t get a Founder’s Pirate, you’ll still be able to play eventually

Backstory

The response to Pirate Nation over the past week has been truly unbelievable. We could not imagine our Discord server would grow from a mere 2K to over 50K+ or that our Twitter would grow from 3K to 60K+, fully organically, in just over a week. We’re floored and beyond grateful. However, all the mint mechanics were not designed for this level of attention.

We’re deeply part of this ecosystem, we mint projects too, we hate grinding for Allowlists, gas wars, and all the other nonsense that comes along with NFT drops. To solve for all of that, we initially built a first-of-its-kind raffle contract that was raised by Paradigm and laid out in Hasu’s Twitter thread. We built it and even had it audited by Chainsecurity and were excited to push the industry forward by building off an experimental piece of open source code. Then the PoolTogether lawsuit happened and our lawyers advised us that it wouldn’t be wise to launch a raffle as it could invite bad actors to bring a similar, frivolous class action lawsuit against us. It was a tough decision, but ultimately we felt that the distraction from a potential lawsuit wasn’t worth risking our ability to build the grander vision at Proof of Play. So we pivoted from an innovative on-chain raffle system to the off-chain Premint.xyz and created the two-tiered system of Goldlist and Stowaway.

The Stowaway Mint will Likely be Messy

Goldlist is a guaranteed mint and will be straight forward for people that are eligible to claim. However, the current Stowaway list is heavily oversubscribed. We’re builders and the growth has caught us completely off guard at this early stage, before we’ve even released a product! We’re doing everything we can to seek out ways to trim the list by removing known bots and obvious Sybil attackers but we’re being careful to avoid screening out good wallets. We also have a few other tricks up our sleeve that we won’t be revealing in this post. Knowing what we know now, we would have probably limited Stowaway to 1 per person and capped it at a certain level but changing the rules this late in the game isn’t fair or right.

Who We Are

One thing that you can always expect from us at Proof of Play is honesty and candor above all else. We’re mature, experienced builders who have been at it for a long time. The most important thing for us is gaining your trust and respect. Founders and builders are human and it’s imperative to be able to own up to mistakes and learn from them. Oversubscribing the stowaway list was just our first mistake and it likely won’t be our last but, what we can promise is that we will always improve from them and evolve.

The Future

We are at the starting line of a long journey and the Founder’s Pirate mint is just the first step. These mints are just one entry point into the Pirate Nation / Proof of Play universe so if you can’t mint, and don’t pick up a Founder’s Pirate off secondary, that doesn’t mean you’ll never be able to play Pirate Nation; this is a point in time, not the end of the ride. We have every intention of finding ways to expand our player base once the beta game is ready. We’re deliberately keeping the beta audience small to make sure we have enough players to get meaningful feedback from, but not too many that we’re overwhelmed.

We are excited to welcome you to this journey that kicks off this week!

Arrrr,

Proof of Play / Pirate Nation