Scaling Pirate Nation, the world’s most popular fully onchain game

Blockchain gaming stands at an inflection point. As fully onchain games gain traction, they’re colliding with hard technical limits, infrastructure bottlenecks, and escalating costs. These games are attracting more players than current technology can handle, creating frustrating experiences for players who want to play but can’t get in. No matter how groundbreaking a game might be, its true value can only emerge when players can play it.

Meet Proof of Play

Proof of Play is a blockchain gaming studio co-founded by CEO Amitt Mahajan, a veteran game developer best known as the co-creator and lead developer of Farmville, the #1 Facebook game that engaged 300M+ players from every country in the world.

When Farmville was shut down in 2020, over a billion hours of player investment, playtime, and creativity was lost forever. This realization drove Amitt to find a way to make games timeless. Recognizing that blockchain technology could create autonomous, player-owned worlds with permanence, he and his team set out to build Proof of Play.

“We’re creating multi-generational products — games that will outlast us and are owned by the communities that play them.” — Amitt Mahajan, CEO @ Proof of Play

In late 2022, they launched their flagship game Pirate Nation, a fully onchain RPG that’s quickly become a breakout success.

Too many pirates, not enough ships

Over the course of just 3 months, Pirate Nation’s 25X explosion in daily active users created an unexpected problem: more players wanted to play than their infrastructure could handle. The game’s success became a limiting factor:

• There were more players queuing to play than actively playing.
• New signups had to be disabled entirely.
• Even with mitigations, players had to endure 1-2 hour queues to enter the game.

As CTO Matt Van discovered, they were hitting the ceiling of what current blockchain infrastructure could support. Their success was their own boss fight.

Strangled by scale

Throughput limits reached

Their system reached the throughput limits of a single Arbitrum Orbit network. At 38-40 Mgas/s during peak traffic, less than 20% of their players could enter Pirate Nation.

Vertical scaling options like RAM-disk nodes or implementing reth would take months that they didn’t have. Player demand was immediate.

Subgraphs couldn’t keep up

Pirate Nation’s indexer became their most severe technical constraint. As transaction volume grew, their subgraph provider regularly fell behind the tip of the chain, preventing player actions from being processed.

Making matters worse, updates to the indexer required re-syncs that took 2-3 months to complete. Even minor schema changes or bug fixes became risky and painful, effectively halting iteration. Backfilling data became a nightmare and it became impossible to make changes.

Despite optimization attempts, subgraphs still hit a hard ceiling once transactions hit 40 Mgas/s. Scaling their database wasn’t viable either; catching up with their volume of historical data would still take months.

These were the same scalability challenges that historically hindered other fully onchain games. Matt refused to let Proof of Play become another statistic.

Scaling up Pirate Nation to meet demand

To break through these challenges, Matt and the team took a two-pronged approach.

1. Expand to a multichain architecture: They began sharding their player base across multiple Arbitrum Orbit chains to immediately multiply throughput capacity and reduce pressure on a single chain.
2. Rebuild their API layer with Goldsky Mirror: Rather than continue patching a fundamentally limited architecture, they rearchitected their entire data delivery stack from raw chain data to in-game UI. This involved replacing subgraphs with Mirror streaming pipelines and migrating to a fast, highly scalable DynamoDB cluster, unified under one schema across all chains (with DynamoDB write limits now becoming the indexing bottleneck!)

The results: a treasure trove of wins

Traditional indexing solutions weren’t built for chains pushing 40+ Mgas/s. Proof of Play needed infra built to handle chain-scale load in real time. Here's what changed when they adopted Goldsky Mirror:

Performance gains

• 80 Mgas/s sustained throughput – 2X their previous ceiling, with room to scale further
• 150X faster reindexing – full chain backfills that took 2-3 months now complete in hours
• Horizontal scalability - new chains can be easily added to scale player capacity
• Real-time inventory updates across thousands of in-game objects, where each is modelled as an ERC-1155 token

Cost optimization

• 70%+ cost reduction - saving hundreds of thousands annually, not including the cost curve of their previous provider

Engineering gains

• Faster shipping velocity - no longer blocked by indexing delays
• Deployment anxiety eliminated - updates now work like any other part of their stack without worrying about extended migrations
• Zero on-call alarms - frequent on-call firefighting eliminated

“We don’t have to worry about scale or performance issues. Since deploying the new Indexer, we have reduced our frequent on-call alarms to effectively nothing.” — Delan Tai, Technical Lead @ Proof of Play

Unblock your engineers (and your players)

👋🏻 Hey, we’re Goldsky. We help teams like Proof of Play solve complex blockchain data scaling challenges so that they can build beloved products without getting buried when demand explodes. If your blockchain data is holding you back too, give us a spin.

Sign up for free or instantly schedule a call to see how we can help you scale. No credit cards or forms to fill.

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Obligatory meetup pic at ETHDenver