Pixelcraft sunsets Aavegotchi L3 Geist and leaves Polygon for Base
Following a 14-day voting process on whether to migrate web3 gaming ecosystem Aavegotchi to Base, a majority of its DAO has approved the move.
With 360 votes in total, 93% were in favour of the move, which had been proposed by Aavegotchi developer Pixelcraft. Leaving Polygon for Base is only one part of a wider plan to reduce burn rate and increase onboarding. The studio recently downsized its team significantly.
Another result will be the complete sunsetting of Aavegotchi’s L3 Geist, which only launched in November 2024.
The reasoning for this, Pixelcraft founder Coder Dan explains, is that “Mindshare for L3s is consistently down, and cross-chain onboarding initiatives that would enable the thesis are still months or even years away.”
Despite Geist being a good idea in theory, he argues that L3s are lacking momentum. The downsides to operating your own L3 are plenty, including “isolation, onboarding friction, and costs”.
Debating which network to make its new home, the options were either Arbitrum or Base, with Ronin rejected due to its slow block times. In the end, the team decided to settle on Base, because of Arbitrum’s “focus on DeFi and L3 rollups”, compared to Base’s more frictionless onboarding and better end user experience.
Described as “a full, all-in, no-looking-back migration”, practically it means existing Aavegotchi assets on Polygon would remain, but they would become frozen and unusable. Their smart contracts will be upgraded in order to prevent transfers, after which the team will clone all assets 1:1 and mint them on Base. This process is expected to take up to six weeks. According to Coder Dan however, much of the migration has already been done.
As for the GOTCHI token and GOTCHI points, rewards that can currently be earned by burning Alchemica, the proposal is to consolidate these into GHST tokens.
The final sunset of Geist is expected to be mid-August 2025, so users are advised to migrate or withdraw their assets before then.
