OpenFront x EigenCloud: How a game night turned into Verifiable Tournaments

We’re thrilled to share that we recently ran the first verifiable tournament on OpenFront, powered by EigenCloud and EigenCompute. 

OpenFront is an indie battle royale with over 800,000 monthly active users

Over the last couple of months we’ve been working closely with the team to explore how verifiable compute could enable real-money tournaments, without sacrificing gameplay or player trust.

How this started

We started working with OpenFront a couple of months ago, but the collaboration began much more informally.

OpenFront had quietly become one of the most-played games in our office. People jumped into matches between meetings, after work, and during breaks. It was competitive in the right way, fast, skill-based, and good enough that every round felt like it should matter.

Naturally, the conversation turned to tournaments. Not in an abstract sense, but real ones. Buy-ins. Payouts. Something that raised the stakes and made winning feel consequential.

That’s when we ran into the same issues the OpenFront team had been dealing with for months.

Running paid tournaments wasn’t just operationally painful, it was fragile. Payment processors froze accounts without warning. International payouts were slow, expensive, or blocked entirely. Even when payouts worked, they required hours of manual effort. And because outcomes were decided centrally, players were asked to trust that everything was handled fairly.

When money is involved, that trust becomes a real constraint.

This wasn’t a lack of demand or effort. It was a structural problem: paid tournaments require a system that can settle outcomes without relying on a single party to make the call. That’s the problem we wanted to solve together.

Building a verifiable tournament

Over the last few months, we worked closely with the OpenFront team to build a proof of concept using EigenCompute. The goal wasn’t to change how the game feels or plays. OpenFront continues to run offchain, with the same latency and player experience.

What changed was how match results are produced and settled. Instead of relying on centralized systems or manual review, results are computed in a way that anyone can verify. This removes the need for the developer to act as a referee, players don’t have to trust the outcome, because the system can prove it.

Once outcomes are verifiable, everything downstream becomes simpler. Payouts no longer depend on manual processes or subjective decisions; they trigger automatically when a match ends. That shift, from trust-based adjudication to verifiable outcomes, is what makes real-money tournaments possible at scale.

Conceptually, the flow is simple: gameplay runs offchain, results are verified by EigenCompute, and payouts settle onchain, without changing the player experience.

Winter Championship Finals

After testing the system with internal and mock tournaments, OpenFront ran a live championship event. The goal was simple: stress-test the system under real conditions and see how players responded.

Here are a few metrics from the championship:

• 5 teams, 30+ players competing
• 200,000+ impressions across platforms
• 20,000+ people watching our livestream
• Multiple livestreams on YouTube
• Strong engagement from the broader gaming and crypto community on X

From the player’s perspective, the experience stayed simple. Players signed up, bought in with USDC, played a normal match, and received payouts automatically when the match ended.

As the OpenFront founder Evan Pellegrini put it:

“Running paid tournaments was impossible before. Payment processors froze accounts, international transfers took weeks, and manually sending payouts took hours.”

Why this matters

With over 800,000 MAU, even modest tournament participation creates meaningful revenue for developers, without ads or intrusive monetization. More importantly, tournaments make games more engaging. 

They don’t interrupt gameplay. They are gameplay. Verifiable outcomes make this possible by removing trust as a requirement.

What’s next

This verifiable tournament was a first step. We’re excited about what this unlocks for competitive games, creator-run events, and onchain game economies more broadly.

To deploy our own verifiable game or application on EigenCloud, visit here.