Hacker Exposes Atari's Asteroids Crypto Arcade Game as a 'Fake' On-Chain Experience

Kautuk Kundan, the founder and CEO of Stackr Labs says he hacked Atari's latest crypto arcade game — built on Coinbase's Ethereum layer-2 network Base — to prove that its Asteroids game was not built on a blockchain despite the claiming to be “on-chain.”

Founder and CEO of Stackr Labs, Kautuk Kundan, claims to have hacked Atari’s latest crypto arcade game, which is built on Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer-2 network, Base, to demonstrate that its Asteroids game is not built on a blockchain, despite claiming to be “on-chain.”

In an Aug. 6 post to X, Kundan shared that he and his team at Stackr Labs managed to sabotage the leaderboard of Atari’s recently launched Asteroids game without even playing a single game.

“The game is not actually on-chain. When the user starts the game nothing happens on-chain, at the end of the game when you get a score, you state that score and you put in an API call,” Kundan explained.

According to Kundan, instead of playing the game and earning a genuine score, he manipulated the official scoreboard of the game simply by sending “API calls to Web2 servers” — which proves that the game is not actually “on-chain” at all.

He added that while he and his team didn’t touch any other scores on the leaderboard, he suggested that other players might not have been as noble and could have easily manipulated their scores to rank higher on the list.

Launched on July 25, Atari’s Asteroids game, in partnership with Coinbase Layer-2 Ethereum network Base, gave players a chance to play the retro arcade game and climb the leaderboard to win prizes, including a $1,000 Atari gift card.

“Even if the app runs off-chain, it should produce commitments that are on-chain verifiable,” Kundan noted.

Kundan used the example to push something called Proof of Gameplay — an Ethereum roll-up system developed by his own firm Stackr — and said that if games and products want to call themselves “on-chain,” they should be verifiable on the blockchain itself.

He also reiterated that the hack was not a “negative call-out” but rather an “attempt to improve upon, and find solutions for persistent problems,” in crypto applications.

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