Developer Hacks Atari’s 'On-Chain' Game Leaderboard to Make a Point

Kautuk Kundan, founder and CEO of Stackr Labs, recently took the spotlight by hacking Atari’s newly released “on-chain” Asteroids game, built on Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network, Base. His aim? To demonstrate that the game’s claims of being “on-chain” were misleading.

In an August 6 post on X, Kundan revealed that he and his team at Stackr Labs managed to manipulate Atari’s Asteroids game leaderboard without actually playing the game. According to Kundan, the game does not operate on-chain as advertised. Instead, he pointed out that when players start the game, no on-chain activity occurs. At the end of the game, players submit their scores via an API call rather than directly recording them on the blockchain.

Kundan’s intervention involved sending API calls to Web2 servers to alter the official scoreboard. This action, he argues, proves that the game does not operate on-chain. He also noted that while his team did not tamper with other scores, the ease with which they could manipulate the leaderboard suggests that others could have done the same to boost their rankings.

Atari launched the Asteroids game on July 25 in collaboration with Coinbase’s Base, with players competing for a spot on the leaderboard and a chance to win prizes like a $1,000 Atari gift card.

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Kundan used this incident to advocate for what he calls “proof-of-gameplay”—an Ethereum roll-up system developed by Stackr Labs. He argues that if a game or application claims to be “on-chain,” it should be verifiable directly on the blockchain.

He clarified that his hack was not intended as a “negative call-out” but rather as an “attempt to address and solve persistent issues” within the crypto gaming space.