Game7 is a DAO set up to fund and build blockchain gaming. BitDAO, the treasury DAO now called Mantle, and Forte, a blockchain gaming company, pledged it $500m in November 2021, and BitDAO's token holders released the first $100m the following August. It spent that money on grants, investments, research reports and products of its own, among them the game launcher HyperPlay, and in 2025 it launched a token, $G7, and its own blockchain. In August 2025 Game7 paused, shut the chain down, and published a list of what it had got wrong.

Its governance separated the money from the votes by design. BitDAO supplied four-fifths of the capital and took about a fifth of the voting rights; committees decided grants and investments; and the members, who called themselves Citizens, voted with a badge on questions about the community's Discord server and avatars.

How did Game7 start?

Ronen Kirsh of Forte and Jon Allen of Magnus Ventures posted BIP-5 to the BitDAO forum on 28 October 2021, the first of several "autonomous entities" BitDAO would fund; Allen co-wrote EduDAO's proposal the next month. BIP-5 asked for $500m over five years, $400m from BitDAO's treasury and $100m from Forte, released in tranches with $100m up front. It split the money into 80% strategic capital, 15% grants for open-source tools and other public goods, and 5% education.

The forum's objections were about votes rather than money. Forum members read the proposal as giving BitDAO 20% of Game7's voting rights for 80% of its funding, and asked what control that left BitDAO's holders, given that the community partners who would hold the rest might be close to Forte. Allen answered that BitDAO would have "less voting power than ownership" on purpose, so that people with expertise in games would make the decisions, and that the aim was for no participant to hold over 20%. He proposed that BitDAO's representatives could veto transfers of voting rights. Others asked why $500m was the right size, and one doubted that anyone had yet built a good blockchain game.

BIP-5 went to a Snapshot vote from 8 to 16 November 2021 and passed with 250m $BIT for and none against, from 11 addresses.

How was Game7 governed?

The formal launch came nine months later, as BIP-5.1, "Game7 Bootstrapping Phase". BitDAO voted it through from 1 to 9 August 2022, with 181m $BIT for and none against, from 39 addresses. It approved the first tranche, $80m from BitDAO with $20m expected from Forte, an operating budget of up to 5% of each tranche, and named Jon Allen and a Windranger Labs contributor known as cateatpeanut as BitDAO's representatives. It delegated decisions on grants, investments and events to committees, and committed Game7 to develop a plan for voting-rights holders to elect and replace those committees. No later proposal in BitDAO's or Mantle's Snapshot space released a second tranche.

The members' own votes ran through a separate Snapshot space, gov.game7dao.eth, where one Citizen badge, an NFT on zkSync Era, cast one vote. The space holds six proposals. Five, between August and December 2023, drew 16 to 49 votes each, on opening a Discord channel to non-Citizens, opening the forum to the public, a Discord chatbot, access to custom emojis, and a co-marketing deal with Taki Games; the first was rejected and the other four passed. The sixth, in September 2024, was a redesign of Game7's avatars, which passed with 47,295 of 47,514 votes. None of the six concerned the treasury.

In the vocabulary of this wiki, Game7 began as a subDAO of BitDAO with its spending delegated to committees, and its members voted only on community matters.

What did Game7 fund and build?

Its grants programme funded open-source tools for blockchain games, especially games that run entirely on a chain. The first recipients, announced in June 2023 from over 350 applications, were Dojo, a game engine for Starknet; Jolly Roger, a toolkit for autonomous games; and Primodium, an onchain game. Its annual State of Web3 Gaming reports counted games, funding rounds and chains across the industry; the 2024 edition, written with the research firm Naavik, covered over 2,500 games and 1,500 funding rounds.

Its products were HyperPlay, a launcher for blockchain games that Game7 founded with ConsenSys, MetaMask's parent company, and which raised a $12m Series A as a separate company in June 2023; Summon, for attracting and keeping players; and World Builder, a set of contracts and services for game developers. EduDAO, BitDAO's student programme, has carried Game7's branding on its website since 2025.

What were $G7 and the G7 Network?

In 2025 Game7 rebuilt itself around a token and a chain, which it presented as a digital nation of player-citizens. The G7 Network went live on 4 February 2025: an Arbitrum Orbit chain, a layer 3 that settles to Arbitrum One, run through the rollup service Conduit, with data kept by a committee rather than posted on chain, according to L2BEAT. The $G7 token went live on 12 February on the G7 Network, Arbitrum One and Ethereum.

Game7's tokenomics allocated 60% of the supply to the community, 20% to core contributors, 12% to early backers and 8% to the Game7 foundation, with 23% unlocked at launch. The first airdrop gave 6% of the supply to players, allocated by credits earned playing in Game7's apps, and a Citizen Pool launched with $1m in USDC for members who staked. The same page described $G7 as the measure of governance power, with votes weighted by each member's reputation. No vote with $G7 appears in Game7's Snapshot space.

Why did Game7 pause?

On 14 August 2025 Game7 announced that it was pausing. The post named four mistakes: it had taken on too many initiatives; its community had become misaligned with its goals as it grew; its products depended on other studios' games succeeding, and it had not built revenue of its own; and it had misjudged how long adoption would take. It said much of the first airdrop had been sold on its first day, and the token's price had fallen far below what the team expected. Game7 cut its spending and staff, and its founders and foundation extended their token lockups by 12 months. The post said Game7 still had years of runway and would need to be rebuilt from the ground up.

The G7 Network shut down in September 2025. Holders had until 10 September to bridge their tokens to Arbitrum One, and on 13 September Game7 airdropped staked positions there, unlocked, ahead of their original schedule. L2BEAT now lists the chain as archived. HyperPlay's website now redirects to CoinFello, an AI agent for crypto trading.

Game7's website now says only that it is planning its next phase, and its last post on X, on 13 September 2025, confirmed the end of the migration. Game7 has not published accounts for the $100m first tranche; Mantle governance, which approved it, is the body to ask, on its forum.

How Caper approaches this

Game7 gave the money to one set of people and the votes to another: BitDAO funded it and held a minority of the votes, committees spent it, and the members' ballots decided community questions. A caper keeps the two together. The holders who carry its treasury's risk decide how it is spent, through proposals drawn from a short list of typed actions, a ranked ballot, and then a market window in which selling is the veto. Part of a member's voting weight is earned only by casting ballots, so a large holding alone cannot capture control.

A $G7 holder could leave by selling the token, and Game7 said many sold the first airdrop on its first day. A caper member who has voted can instead leave with a share of the treasury at any time, without a proposal, in the tradition of rage-quit.

See also

• Mantle (formerly BitDAO) – the treasury that funded Game7
• EduDAO – BitDAO's university programme, from the same proposer, now carrying Game7's branding
• Yield Guild Games – a gaming DAO built around players rather than a fund
• Arbitrum DAO – the network the G7 Network settled to, and where $G7 moved
• Token-weighted voting – the model BIP-5 departed from
• How DAOs fail – the failure catalogue Game7's August 2025 post adds to

References

• BIP-5: A $500M blockchain gaming ecosystem acceleration DAO (BitDAO forum, 28 October 2021) – the proposal and the debate over voting rights
• BIP-5 Snapshot vote (8–16 November 2021)
• BIP-5.1: Game7 Bootstrapping Phase (BitDAO forum, 22 July 2022) and the Snapshot vote (1–9 August 2022)
• BIP-21 (May 2023) – BitDAO's merger into Mantle, which left Game7's governance and strategy to Game7
• Game7 DAO on Snapshot – the six Citizen votes
• Game7 announces first on-chain gaming tech grant recipients (BlockchainGamerBiz, June 2023)
• Game7 Releases 2024 State of Web3 Gaming Report (PR Newswire, 14 November 2024)
• HyperPlay raises $12 million (Decrypt, June 2023)
• $G7 Tokenomics (Game7 Learning Center) and G7 on L2BEAT
• Game7's pause announcement (X, 14 August 2025) and the G7 Network migration page