This Ex-TON Labs Exec Is Launching a $500K Tournament for a Game That Helps Power a New Blockchain—Here’s How It Works
Staff Writer • 2025-04-05
Imagine playing a mobile game where your screen swipes and finger taps aren’t just scoring points—they’re helping power a next-generation blockchain. Sounds insane, right? That’s exactly what former TON Labs CTO Mitja Goroshevsky is building with his new venture, Acki Nacki, and its first breakout project, Popit Games. To prove his new blockchain’s scalability and speed, Goroshevsky is launching an esports-style tournament with over $500,000 in rewards—before the actual blockchain has even gone live. “We wanted to showcase what this technology can do,” Goroshevsky said on the Stonks Go Moon podcast. “So we said—why not let people secure the network by playing a game?” Wait, how is this even possible? Let’s break it down. Acki Nacki is a new blockchain protocol that’s trying to solve a huge problem: scalability. In plain English, most blockchains can either be fast or handle a lot of users—not both. Ethereum gets bogged down when too many people use it. Solana is fast but struggles with network stability. Goroshevsky’s solution? A new system called "Acki Nacki Consensus", which trades pure certainty for lightning speed using probabilistic validation—something that still stays secure but works faster, much like modern cryptography. But here's where it gets crazy: Instead of relying on server farms or mining rigs to secure the network, Acki Nacki uses players' actions inside a game to generate the random values needed to help validate transactions. Enter Popit Games To build and test this system in the real world, Goroshevsky and his team built Popit Games, a fully on-chain, 3D card battler that’s launching with a massive tournament. It already has over 6 million users pre-registered, thanks to a Telegram mini-app released months ago. In the game, users swipe and interact with their screens in a way that generates entropy—a fancy word for randomness—which is then used to secure the blockchain. These users, dubbed "verifiers," get rewarded with a portion of the network’s block rewards: a kind of passive income just for playing a mobile game. “22.5% of block rewards will go directly to players,” says Goroshevsky. “It’s gamified staking, in a sense—but without the staking.” The Tournament: Big Money, Real Tech Stress Test To stress-test the system, the Acki Nacki team is launching a tournament where up to a million players can compete for a piece of the $500K+ prize pool. The game is being released on mobile and Steam, but only mobile users will help secure the blockchain—because only mobile inputs can be verified on-chain. And because everything is happening on-chain, there are no traditional servers powering the game. Instead, the game state is reconstructed in real time directly from blockchain transactions—meaning you can watch the match as if it were live, just by following the data. This approach also lets them build a broadcast system for the tournament, where spectators can see what players are doing, how the game is progressing, and even get an AI-powered visual of the gameplay—all streamed from blockchain data. Why it matters Goroshevsky is building more than just a game. He’s laying the foundation for a new way to think about decentralized applications—where games, finance, social apps, and more can be powered not by servers in the cloud, but by users’ actions on their phones. If it works, Acki Nacki could be one of the first blockchains to achieve real scalability without compromising speed or decentralization. And it’s doing it with a game that’s not only fun—but functionally part of the chain itself. “We wanted to show people that you can build real, scalable applications on-chain,” says Goroshevsky. “And if it takes a card game with half a million dollars in prizes to prove it—so be it.” Join the Tournament: https://www.ackinacki.com/ Or go directly to https://popitgames.ackinacki.com/ to register. You might just win some crypto—and help secure the future of Web3 while you're at it.
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