How Conduit Enables Proof of Play to Run the Biggest Onchain Game for 0.04 ETH Per Month in Gas Fees

Proof of Play is the blockchain gaming studio behind Pirate Nation, the world’s most popular onchain game. With tens of thousands of daily active users (DAUs) carrying out millions of transactions per day, Pirate Nation is closer than perhaps any other onchain app to the scale and throughput of a web2 consumer app.

Even more impressive: Proof of Play achieves all of this for as little as 0.04 ETH per month in gas fees. How does Proof Play support so much onchain activity for so little? By running its own rollup, powered by Conduit: the Proof of Play Apex Chain. Keep reading to learn not just how Conduit helped Proof of Play launch a chain tailor-made for its gaming use case, but how we’ve worked alongside them to continuously push the limits of onchain scalability.

The Proof of Play rollup stack

Framework: Arbitrum Orbit

Settlement layer: Arbitrum One

DA layer: Arbitrum AnyTrust

How Proof of Play is innovating

Proof of Play builds fully onchain games, meaning every single aspect of gameplay takes place on the blockchain. In addition to providing players access to a unique in-game crypto economy, this also means Proof of Play games are permanent in a way web2 games aren’t. Even if the entire team quit tomorrow, Pirate Nation would exist in perpetuity on the blockchain. Fully onchain games are also composable — players can modify games like Pirate Nation permissionlessly, without waiting for the studio to release a creator suite, as would happen with a web2 game.

All of that makes Pirate Nation’s infrastructure requirements very demanding, especially as the game scales. “There are over 500 smart contracts powering the game,” said Matt Van, Head of Engineering at Proof of Play. “Everything from player progression, to questing, to crafting happens onchain.” 

But Apex Chain needs to do more than process a huge amount of complex gameplay — it needs to do it quickly and smoothly. “The whole point of Pirate Nation is that it should feel like a great game, not a blockchain experiment,” said Van. “All the crazy smart contract stuff needs to happen below the surface.” Proof of Play tapped Conduit to launch a chain that could support seamless onchain gaming, and we’ve worked with them to scale that chain to tens of thousands of users.  

How Conduit deployed Proof of Play’s Apex Chain and scaled it to 34+ TPS and 68+ mgas per second

Proof of Play first deployed Pirate Nation as a dApp on Polygon, and then Arbitrum Nova in a second iteration. Fees made both setups untenable. “Our monthly gas bill hit $70,000 on Polygon with just a few hundred players,” said Van. “It only lasted a few weeks.” Arbitrum Nova was a big improvement, but Proof of Play eventually needed a more cost-efficient setup as its user base grew.  

It became clear that a fully onchain game needs its own chain. Specifically, the Proof of Play team decided that the Apex Chain should be an L3 on Arbitrum Orbit. “Arbitrum was the only thing out there fast enough to run Pirate Nation without feeling like you're playing on a 56k modem,” said Van. 

The only question then was who to build the chain with. Proof of Play knew it wanted to partner with a rollup provider so that it could focus all its resources on creating the best user experience possible. After a lengthy evaluation of several providers, Proof of Play decided to work with Conduit due to the team’s deep knowledge of Arbitrum’s infrastructure, and track record running other high-performing chains. 

Conduit worked with Proof of Play to put together the best possible Arbitrum tech stack, resulting in a chain with 250 millisecond block times — fast enough to deliver an onchain gaming experience on par with a web2 game.  Launch happened quickly after that. “Conduit fires up chains quickly,” said Van. 

Since that launch, the Apex Chain has grown and scaled to become one of the highest-performing chains in operation. Transactions per second (TPS) have grown from 2.0 to daily averages as high as 34.9, or more than 3 million per day.

But raw transactions don’t tell the whole story. Remember, Proof of Play’s transactions are more than just swaps and transfers. They represent the logic for an entire game. As such, they’re highly compute-intensive. The best way to quantify this is to look at Proof of Play’s gas usage. 

Proof of Play has grown from 1 to 2 megagas per second to regularly hitting 40 in recent months, with usage occasionally spiking to as much as 67.8. Those numbers make Proof of Play by far the chain with the greatest gas throughput in the Ethereum ecosystem — usually around 4x that of the next-closest chain.  

As an L3 on Arbitrum, Proof of Play gets the computational power to host an onchain game that feels like a web2 game, all for a fraction of what it spent as a dApp serving a much smaller user base. As a sovereign L3, Proof of Play doesn’t have to worry about gas, and has spent a total of 1.3 ETH on settlement in four months since launch — a fraction of its $70,000 per month in gas fees on Polygon. Settlement costs have also trended down recently following Arbitrum One’s rollout of blobs and our increase of Apex chain’s batch size — in the 30 days ending on July 22, Proof of Play has paid just 0.04 ETH in settlement. “It’s so low that we don’t even need to pay attention to it,” said Van.

Conduit and Proof of Play: Co-evolving to push the limits of blockchain scalability

Van also emphasized the value Proof of Play has gotten from partnering with the Conduit team. “Some teams will just point us to a community forum when we have a problem,” said Van. “Conduit worked with us like a partner, solving problems together. It felt like an extension of our team.” 

Scaling an onchain game like Pirate Nation presents unique challenges. Proof of Play routinely bumps up against the throughput ceiling a blockchain can support, prompting Conduit to make a fix that enables them to break through and push a new limit. For instance, Apex Chain initially had a gas usage ceiling of 7.5 megagas per second — the standard for L3s on Arbitrum. But soon enough, that ceiling could no longer support Proof of Play’s growing user base. “Lots of infrastructure starts to break down at that throughput,” said Van. “It was important for us to work with partners who are hyper responsive and solution-oriented towards the demand we're seeing.” Conduit made special enhancements to Apex’s sequencer and RPC infrastructure to consistently hit 40 megagas per second. 

“No one else has scaled an onchain game this fast or this far. Conduit is at the forefront of this with us, learning what breaks and when,” said Van. 

The next step for Proof of Play and Conduit is to take Apex multichain. With multiple chains sharing the load of Pirate Nation, similar to server sharding in web2, more users will be able to play concurrently. We anticipate that going multichain will enable Proof of Play to hit 100 megagas per second in the near future.  “We've already spun up and down 30+ testnet chains on conduit, so we know they are ready to handle not just our second, but third, fourth and fifth chains.”

If you'd like to see how Conduit can help you launch a rollup for your onchain game, contact us here!