jon jordan

Deconstructing systems | from mechanics to culture

[jon jordan @blockchaingmg]

This week, we discuss @aavegotchi DAO move, and @pixels_online talking open source, within the context of @MaplestoryU @EVE_Frontier @soccerverse leveraging builders, ecosystem, open data and AI agents. I also invent the terms gamey-games and non-gamey games.

00:35 Aavegotchi dev Pixelcraft is one of the OG web3 gaming studios.
05:16 It's looking to hand over control of Aavegotchi to the DAO.
06:28 DAOs haven't been successful for reasons like coordination and authority.
07:25 It's a nice vision, but the reality is Pixelcraft ran out of money.
08:01 By 1st September, the DAO has to have decided what's happening going forward.
09:16 Why “gamey games” are harder to hand over to communities or DAOs.
09:55 State of Pixels. It's sustainable but not growing.
11:30 Pixels is now considering adding open-source elements.
12:05 AI significantly changes what community developers can build in blockchain games.
13:50 The emerging pattern is surviving web3 games are moving to APIs, MCPs and agent access.
15:15 Why blockchain and AI fit together culturally and technically.
19:05 Define “game games” versus “non-game games”.
20:49 Why blockchain games should focus less on moment-to-moment fun and more on meta.
23:30 EVE Frontier, MapleStory and Soccerverse as examples of meta-focused web3 games.
25:25 These games have emergent experiences. They don't require constant content updates.
28:30 Don’t put things onchain to create value. Put existing value onchain so it can be realized.
32:40 Community-built Soccerverse fantasy football as a sign of where this goes next.
35:05 The first 10 years of blockchain gaming were about discovering what didn’t work.
35:40 AI plus blockchain will enable things the traditional games industry won’t build.
37:06 Why agents will become native players for blockchain games.
38:20 The future split: Mario-like gameplay games versus agent-filled systemic web3 worlds.

[jon jordan @blockchaingmg]

You can now simulate how the @soccerverse Summer Showdown will work in terms of how player influence generates points as well as the best performing players and accounts. https://t.co/qWjuEliBk8

[jon jordan @blockchaingmg]

I'm building a game on top of a game. https://t.co/ipFFMK1Gjx

[jon jordan @blockchaingmg]

Something vibe-coded this way comes...

[Memento @0xMementoMori]

https://t.co/saxV72YAXY

[jon jordan @blockchaingmg]

@sebkrier Hunting Woozles is better than hunting Heffalumps.

[jon jordan @blockchaingmg]

@ysiu @Calendly @hellominds_ Are you solving the issue or complicating it?

[jon jordan @blockchaingmg]

@punk9059 Add Cloudflare's MCP to Claude Code and build websites. Also the new Coinbase Base MCP connects to the x402 standard. Early but lots of alpha there.

[Luke Barwikowski 🚜 @whatslukedoing]

State of Pixels

At Pixels we have managed to make our game sustainable after years of effort - but it's still not growing!

Do not worry though - Pixels is not & will never shut off.

I want to say that clearly first because I know whenever we start talking about strategy changes, open source, Stacked, rewards, or anything like that, people can start to wonder what it means for the main game.

The thing I want to talk about is more around where we go next.

The mandate of the foundation is the growth of p2e. Growth is the mandate of any game, economy, or business.

At Pixels we have managed to do something that, honestly, very few Web3 games have done. We have kept a game alive for years, through multiple market cycles, multiple economy reworks, hundreds of gameplay updates, and a lot of very real pressure from real users, real incentives, real bots, real farmers, real holders, and real expectations.

But it is also not enough...

The reality is that Pixels is sustainable now, but it is not growing the way we want it to grow yet. And the mandate of the Pixels ecosystem / Foundation is growth. Not just keeping things alive. Not just surviving. The goal is to grow rewarded play, grow the solana:EkDGB5fbPXiRmDDjxKcC7dFjzvFZj2KT9t7oeyyPx4SX ecosystem, and keep pushing this category forward.

Well how do we grow? My take...
1) We need to optimize earnings better
2) Gameplay needs to improve
👉 Through core mechanic upgrades
👉 and better funnel optimization

How might we get there and where are our heads at now?

"We need to optimize earnings better"
Some might initially disagree when I say that this needs to be a primary focus - but the core issue is that ignoring earnings / ownership aspects of the economy actually leads to worse issues long-run. If you are building a real economy, obviously you need to plan and design the correct economic incentives.

We are still seeing that the game is still giving rewards to many users who are here for pure extraction. No matter what gameplay mechanic are added - if that is not addressed the issue stays the same regardless of gameplay added.

@stacked_app launched in March - but we have still been working on getting our full data-driven insights into the rewards of Pixels. This week are we optimizing rewards and we are attempting to see if this will lead to a lift in our internally tracked metric RORS (return on reward spend).

Currently Pixels gives rewards under it's current budgeted allocation - however, if we are able to lift RORS, we can also start to see if we can increase volume of rewards. If RORS can be maintained with higher volume, that may mean we can reliably grow Pixels and ecosystem.

"Gameplay Needs To Improve"
Pixels has something really special that I do not want to undersell: long-tail retention. There are people who have played Pixels for years at this point. There are people who have made Pixels part of their daily routine. That is very rare and something that I personally feel a huge loyalty and obligation for.

But there are also issues we need to be honest about.

1) New user retention
Historically this was good for Pixels, but has fallen over the last year - d1 retention is only sitting at ~25% now - a better target would be ~40%.

If we ever want to build paid funnels of Pixels - that d1-d7 needs to improve. We are currently building large updates that will help address this.

2) Game Mechanics
Pixels has never claimed to have the most innovative gameplay compared to web2 games - however there are things that Pixels has that not many other games have. Real earnings in the game leads to a real economy, and a lot of the social gameplay that Pixels has fostered has been unique and great at moments.

We have pushed out hundreds of gameplay updates at this point, reworked the entire game economy 3-4 times. This work has gotten us from something unsustainable to making something that is kind of working - kind of working is not good enough though.

The hard part is that there are only so many things the internal team can do at once. Pixels is a very large and complex game now. There is a lot of code, a lot of systems, a lot of legacy, and a lot of surface area.

This is one of the reasons we are seriously exploring moving Pixels toward an open-source model.

This is not 100% confirmed yet.

But if we go in this direction, the idea would be to open-source both the client and the server.

The idea would be that people could actually run Pixels, contribute to Pixels, build new features, experiment with new mechanics, or even fork their own versions of the game.

This would be a multi-month initiative if we do it. It would need to be done carefully. There are security issues, economy issues, infra issues, ownership issues, and a lot of details to get right.

Potential Open Source Plan (again, not confirmed)
To be very clear: this would not replace the current version of Pixels.

The current Pixels world would remain live. We would continue to maintain it. We would continue to update it. We would continue to protect the community and the economy.

Open source would be an expansion of the ecosystem, not a shutdown of the main game.

The way I am thinking about it right now is something like this:

Pixels becomes more open as a game.

@stacked_app becomes the infrastructure layer for rewards, payments, ownership checks, and economic rails.

solana:EkDGB5fbPXiRmDDjxKcC7dFjzvFZj2KT9t7oeyyPx4SX remains central to the ecosystem.

The official Pixels world remains live.

And community-built versions of Pixels could potentially plug into the broader ecosystem if they use the right infrastructure.

Potential solana:EkDGB5fbPXiRmDDjxKcC7dFjzvFZj2KT9t7oeyyPx4SX Economic Integration...
If someone forks the game, that does not automatically mean they get access to solana:EkDGB5fbPXiRmDDjxKcC7dFjzvFZj2KT9t7oeyyPx4SX rewards or official ecosystem support. The game code and the economy are different things.

What we would want to provide is a path where community-run experiences could connect back into Pixels / Stacked infrastructure in a controlled way. That could mean solana:EkDGB5fbPXiRmDDjxKcC7dFjzvFZj2KT9t7oeyyPx4SX payments, reward budgets, ownership checks, staking, land/NFT-related systems, or other things we still need to design.

But the high-level idea is:

open up the game
protect the economy
make solana:EkDGB5fbPXiRmDDjxKcC7dFjzvFZj2KT9t7oeyyPx4SX more useful
let the community build
keep the official world alive

Our Priorities and Promises
We have a duty to the community to make sure that we...
1. Protect the game and community people love
2. Protect the solana:EkDGB5fbPXiRmDDjxKcC7dFjzvFZj2KT9t7oeyyPx4SX ecosystem
3. Improve reward efficiency so rewards can support real growth
4. Improve gameplay and new-player retention
5. Explore open source in a way that expands Pixels instead of replacing it
6. Make stronger, more focused bets around what can actually grow the ecosystem (like new games such as chubkins)

This is a commitment of treasury, effort, and resource allocation.

We are trying to move Pixels into its next phase.

The last few years were about proving that a Web3 could become sustainable - we have done that - now we need to search for growth.

Other Growth Bets
The other thing I want to be clear about is that Pixels is not the only way we are trying to grow the ecosystem.

We are also working on Chubkins and Stacked.

The way I think about this is pretty simple:

Pixels is the world and community that proved a lot of this can work.

Stacked is the infrastructure layer we built from those lessons... Rewards, payments, data, offer design, ownership checks, and better reward targeting.

Chubkins is one of our next growth bets using that infrastructure

Chubkins has been built ground up with a more Web2-first approach. The goal is to take what we have learned from Pixels and rewarded play, but apply it to a game that can hopefully reach a broader audience, scale through more traditional paid growth, and use Stacked underneath to make rewards smarter.

We have already seen some promising early signals from Chubkins paid growth tests, which is why we are taking it seriously as a growth bet. It still needs polish, tuning, and a lot of iteration, but it gives us a cleaner place to test rewarded play, user acquisition, referrals, and reward economics in a more mainstream product - but it is nearly done with development and will be ready to start testing GTM this next month.

This does not mean Pixels becomes less important.

It means the ecosystem becomes less dependent on one game doing everything.

A lot of this is still being figured out but I prefer transparent communication with our community as we have done since the very beginning.

Pixels is alive. Pixels will keep running. And the next phase is about taking everything we have learned and turning it into a stronger ecosystem.

[jon jordan @blockchaingmg]

Is the @PlayBlankos market waking up?

[jon jordan @blockchaingmg]

@larsiusprime @tomhfh Hahaha. 🤣 Our local house taxes haven't been updated since 1991. Our high speed railway started building in 2020 and won't see its first train until 2036. Even if we could calculate a land tax, trying to implement it would bring down the government immediately.

[Luke Barwikowski 🚜 @whatslukedoing]

Community-driven development & open-source wasn't very effective a few years ago for games - barely anyone had the skills to contribute meaningfully

However, now with AI almost anyone can build / contribute

With the right incentives and infra maybe something can work now 🤔

[jon jordan @blockchaingmg]

A week of winning blockchain gaming news consisting of @EVE_Frontier @MaplestoryU and @WemixNetwork

00:34 Jon attended EVE Fanfest 2026 in Iceland. What were his takeaways?
02:40 Why EVE Fanfest works beyond being just an cool event for players to meet.
05:05 EVE Frontier is EVE Online if made from scratch.
06:46 In Cycle 6 (out 25th June), EVE Frontier finally becomes an actual survival game.
09:28 Modular shipbuilding replaces fixed ships.
10:40 EVE Frontier is a game that rewards player for improving their manual gameplay skills.
11:55 “This is a game that makes EVE Online feel cuddly.”
13:58 Does EVE Frontier need non-EVE players?
15:30 Its fundamental approach is blockchain as a unified API.
16:38 Why some CCP/Fenris developers want to work on EVE Frontier, not EVE Online.
17:38 How EVE Frontier is using AI for coding and prototyping.
19:10 Nexon is talking about MapleStory Universe, MSU 2.0 and VIBE IP.
22:11 MapleStory Universe did $31 million in revenue in year 1.
23:22 The real KPI for MSU 2.0 is the revenue third-party devs make in year 2.
25:55 Average EVE Fanfest attendee had played 7,900 hours of EVE Online.
30:50 Legend of Ymir has released the ability to mint and trade character NFTs.
32:00 Legend of Ymir NFT character trading volume was $77,000 on day 1.
34:40 Ubisoft is shutting down Champions Tactics’ web3 features on 27th May.
36:00 Ubisoft’s blockchain problems are a minor part of much wider issues for the company.
39:00 Champions Tactics was beautifully made, but too narrow in its addressable audience.
42:29 Wemade is iteratively learning. Ubisoft's games are scattergun, lacking feedback loops for the company.
44:30 The post-crash shape of successful blockchain gaming is now becoming apparent.

[jon jordan @blockchaingmg]

As I write, EVE Fanfest 2026 prepares to reach its climax in the Party at the End of the World — its own private Ragnarok. It’s an appropriate context to attempt to order my thoughts about what is the most ambitious blockchain game in development.

Not that the ambition is only about blockchain.

For, creating a clean-sheet space survival game set in the EVE Universe is an ambitious undertaking. And that’s why @EVE_Frontier 68-strong development team seems so enthusiastic about their task.

It goes without saying they love EVE Online but working on a two-decade-old game can be restrictive. And many of them have worked on EVE Online for years. That’s one of the reasons Frontier has ended up with such an experienced team.

“The saying is put young developers on old games, and old developers on young games,” jokes game director Saemundur Hermannsson, ten years into his CCP, now Fenris Creations, career.

Thanks to his interest in crypto — “memecoins are just financial PVP” — it was to Hermannsson that CEO @HilmarVeigar turned in November 2021 to make the first internal presentation about what would become EVE Frontier.

With days to go before the presentation, Hermannsson — worried that his presentation was too boring — roped in livewire creative director Pavel Savchuck, who remains responsible for the game’s sharp, aggressive vision.

“Awake, Eternally”, he screamed out — more than once — from the Fanfest stage as the culmination of what was more performance art than Fanfest keynote.

And yet the phrase sits uneasily. For one thing, it doesn’t make obvious sense. It’s not “Live, Eternally” or “Die, Eternally”, or even “Fight, Eternally”; any of which could seemingly work for a game set in the EVE universe.

“Awake, Eternally” seems like a daily task. An ongoing, difficult task.

But it’s this sort of dissonance, and repetitive effort, that points to the sort of experience Hermannsson, Savchuck et al are trying to build.

Its description as a ‘space survival game’ hadn’t chimed with me, partly because I hadn’t played the game enough, but mainly because the game hadn’t previously contained those sort of features.

The launch of Cycle 6 on 25th June will go a long way to change this.

New environmental elements such as heat from being too close to a star or the overwhelming cold of space will now kill you and your ship. The game’s NPC feral AIs have been modified, made smarter, given communication skills, and, as a group, made more deadly. Then there’s the new leech enemy, which will attach to your ship, drain its energy, and then disengage, hiding to create a chrysalis, then spawning into a mini-boss.

There’s even collision damage, another reinforcement of the game’s demand to base itself on real-world physics. This runs as deep as simulating the collision of three black holes with “trippy gravitational lensing” to create the game’s underlying structure of 1 million solar systems. Planets are placed procedurally, with asteroids sprinkled around, based on Lagrange orbits.

It’s all very different compared to EVE Online, which now seems rather cuddly in comparison. There are plenty of ways to die in EVE, of course, but these mainly involve being killed by other players. By contrast, in Frontier, the very fabric of the game is actively trying to kill you.”

“Survival is key. It’s a visceral experience,” explains Savchuck. “You will die and suffer for a reason. It will be a transformative struggle.”

Getting players committed to ‘death as useful information’ will be key, and one key element of this is the way players will save and use their progress.

The game’s fundamental element is Self: your permanent identity, which give players a maximum of 27 slots into which they save their skills. These capabilities can then be copied into crowns, which are slotted into a shell that’s your game character, sitting in your ship.

You will have many shells, each optimized for specific tasks. Deploying them in-game enables you to accumulate experiences that you can save into your Self when you return to base, giving EVE Frontier some of the rhythm of an extraction shooter.

Save often, because your shells are going to be destroyed, over and over again.

In that context, “Awake, Eternally” encapsulates less an aspiration and more a work ethic. That’s where meaning will be found.

This is also reflected in how the ship system works. Unlike EVE Online, in which players build or buy Fenris-designed ship types from a catalogue, you will create your unique ship by building, trading and installing individual components.

It’s another system that will launch in Cycle 6, alongside “much, much more”, including the ability to take manual control over your ship’s weapons.

This builds on Cycle 5’s introduction of direct control of your ship’s movement, including support for gamepads. Cycle 6 will complete the feedback loop adding collision damage.

As you’d hope, every new freedom comes with its own set of challenges. And that’s something which feeds into how EVE Frontier integrates blockchain.

At Fanfest, no one from Fenris Creations was eager to talk about blockchain in the speculative sense. When it did come up, it was framed as a unified API: a way to expose the game’s logic, assets and systems so other people can build on top of them. But nor was it ignored. @Mysten_Labs CEO @KevinBoon_ML joined Hilmar for a fireside chat, while the team behind @SuiNetwork had a full presence onsite.

That matters because Frontier’s blockchain deployment is not supposed to create meaning by itself. The point is not that an object is onchain and therefore valuable. The point is that, if the world is dangerous enough, persistent enough and socially complex enough, then objects, structures, routes, ships and services can start to accumulate meaning through use.

That is what most blockchain games got backwards. They assumed markets generated meaning. It turned out markets only provided an exit price, not a reason to care. Creating the culture required to sustain long-term value has proved much harder. But EVE Frontier is trying to reverse the order. Build the world first, then let ownership matter.

Enabling anyone to build in its universe is also fundamental to that goal. It’s something underlined by the winner of the recent hackathon, Reality Anchor, who created his CradleOS over eight months by talking to ChatGPT. More bizarrely, he’s never played EVE Online, and only got into EVE Frontier after seeing a Facebook ad.

But this is the perfect encapsulation of the new AI era of gaming for which EVE Frontier is positioned: the classic case of being where the puck is heading.

Or as Hermannsson says, “We are going to build the game. The players will build the rest”.

And, ultimately, this is why EVE Frontier is so ambitious. Not because it is a blockchain game, but because it is building a world hard enough, strange enough and open enough that blockchain might finally have something meaningful to preserve.

[jon jordan @blockchaingmg]

My favorite EVE fanfest memory will be going on the pub crawl with Fenris Creations' lawyer, who had a backpack full of beer, talking about AI in an Irish pub that had wall art of famous Irish sportsmen, including Ronaldo. 🤣

[jon jordan @blockchaingmg]

@EVE_Frontier TL;DR Manual controls are foundational.

[EVE Frontier @EVE_Frontier]

Fanfest 2026 approaches!

Riders, builders, and developers are gathering in Reykjavík from across the Frontier.

Updates from the EVE Frontier team will be shared throughout the weekend, directly from the event.

🎥 Watch the EVE Frontier Keynote live on Fenris Creations’ Twitch, Saturday at 14:00 UTC:
https://t.co/zITu80ghtl

🗓️ Full schedule:
https://t.co/gEMbcO55XY

Stay awakened...

[jon jordan @blockchaingmg]

@apixtwts @krakenberrypie People don't want to see AI everywhere. They want to performatively tell everyone they are morally better.

[Luke Barwikowski 🚜 @whatslukedoing]

we have run hundreds of ad variants for chubkins

👉 when an ad mentions crypto rewards it performs WORSE than baseline

👉 when an ad mentions gift cards it performs WAY BETTER than baseline

paid funnels for web3 are virtually impossible - consumers hate the mention of crypto

[jon jordan @blockchaingmg]

Surprising blockchain game news this week as
@GoogleDeepMind takes a stake in @EVE_Frontier
dev @FenrisCreations

00:32 Fenris Creations (ex-CCP Games) has gained independence from Pearl Abyss for $120 million.
02:26 Pearl Abyss originally bought the company for $225 million in 2018.
03:26 Why CCP and Pearl Abyss were an awkward fit, culturally and corporately.
04:35 Pearl Abyss now has very successful games such as Crimson Desert so doesn't need CCP.
05:28 Fenris still owes Pearl Abyss $50 million for a loan.
06:52 CCP/Fenris has been loss-making for many years.
07:07 $60 million of EVE Frontier tokens have now been sold to investors.
07:47 The unanswered questions around the deal - debt, operational capital etc.
10:28 Google DeepMind now has a minority stake in Fenris Creations.
11:30 Why DeepMind is interested in EVE Online as a learning environment for AI models and agents.
12:50 Long-term memory for agents is of particular interest.
13:50 Why DeepMind is a major credibility boost for the newly independent company.
14:48 DeepMind potentially reframes EVE Frontier’s significance as a blockchain game.
17:00 FIFA Rivals has launched its World Cup Legacy mode.
20:10 The Legacy mode allows people to play through the past 4 world cups and collect players.
23:30 Legacy players allows Mythical to better control the supply of rare NFTs.
24:35 Animoca Minds has launched a $10 million developer program.
30:49 Animoca has extended the exclusivity period for its reverse Nasdaq listing process.