Stackr Labs says it 'hacked' Atari’s crypto arcade game to disprove on-chain claim

Blockchain tech firm Stackr Labs founder Kautuk Kundan said Tuesday that he and his team hacked Atari’s latest arcade game to show that the game is not actually “on-chain” despite its claim to be so. 

Kundan wrote on an X post that they hacked into Atari’s Asteroids, built on Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer-2 Base, and sabotaged the leaderboard without playing the game. 

"We hacked Base and Atari’s arcade and sabotaged the leaderboard without playing a single game. And this is why people have trust issues with crypto apps," he wrote.

“If you actually go to the leaderboard and see the top three participants, the second one is our wallet,” Kundan added in a video recording attached to his X post.

Last month, Atari partnered with Base and Stack to launch Onchain Arcade, which claimed to bring classic arcade games such as Asteroids and Breakout on the blockchain. Users have to connect their wallets and mint certain NFTs to access the games on the platform, which promises players with high scores recorded on the leaderboards various rewards such as Atari’s renewed arcade game console.

“So when the user starts the game, nothing happens on-chain,” Kundan said. “At the end of the game when you get a score, you just take that score and you put it in an API call and send it to Stack’s server, where it puts it inside a points system.”

The Stackr Labs CEO said that the same API call worked for every wallet address and that nothing is unique. “At the very least, I should not be able to manipulate the scores just by sending API calls to web2 servers,” Kundan said.

While Kundan stated that he and his team did not manipulate other scores on the leaderboard, he said he could not assure that no one else had figured out such a loophole in the game system.

“This is why people have trust issues with crypto apps,” Kundan wrote in his X post. “‘On-chain’ is becoming a throwaway term for a majority of consumer tech. As a community, we should be doing better than this.”

Notably, the blockchain element in most crypto games is primarily concerned with transactions. Smart contracts are employed to manage in-game assets, while the front end—the interface through which users engage with the game—is typically hosted off-chain on cloud servers.

Atari and Base did not immediately respond to The Block’s request for comments.