Mike Hale MagicBlock has named the winners of Solana Blitz v8, its one-week game hackathon, with a Solana Mobile party game called Herd taking first place out of 36 projects shipped from 11 countries. Second and third went to Ultra Pong, an eight-player survival Pong, and Alerith, a 3D medieval MMORPG that has been in development for three years.
All four winning projects run gameplay logic inside an Ephemeral Rollup rather than on Solana mainnet directly, and three of the four use MagicBlock VRF for their randomness.
An Ephemeral Rollup is MagicBlock's short-lived execution environment. You delegate specific accounts to it, run your game's writes there at whatever tick rate the game needs, and settle the result back to Solana. A duel or a round of Pong then never waits on a block.
The four winning projects
🥇 1st Place: Herd
Herd is a party game for Solana Mobile from @dezloperr. Everyone answers the same question inside 30 seconds, and the players whose answer matches the crowd survive while the rest get cut. The answers sit in a Private Ephemeral Rollup, which keeps them hidden from other players until the round resolves, and the table assignments and the coin flip come from MagicBlock VRF. In a game scored on matching the crowd, a player who can read the other answers before the buzzer wins every round, so the privacy is load-bearing. No public link has been posted yet.
🥈 2nd Place: Ultra Pong
Ultra Pong from @KshitijGajapure is eight-player survival Pong. Each player holds a wall, and losing your wall shrinks the arena until one player is left. The physics run at 20 ticks per second in an Ephemeral Rollup, seeded by MagicBlock VRF. You can play it at ultra-pong.vercel.app.
🥉 3rd Place: Alerith
Alerith from @xTrinks is the outlier in the group, because it did not start last week. It is a 3D medieval MMORPG with three years behind it and an item economy where every item is player-made. It brought its duel arena to Blitz, running under 50ms in an Ephemeral Rollup with rare loot rolled on MagicBlock VRF. You can play it at alerith.com.
🏆 Wizardio's Choice: HoldOut
HoldOut from @priyanshudotsol, who has now won three Blitz editions, took Wizardio's Choice, the judge's pick. Players either fold early and pay a toll or hold to the bell and split the pot, with the rounds running in an Ephemeral Rollup while custody of funds stays on Solana. You can play it at holdout.priyanshu.pro.
Why does the same stack keep showing up?
Every winner leaned on the same MagicBlock pieces, because onchain games break in the same places.
The first is latency. A duel, a rally, or a 30-second buzzer cannot tolerate a confirmation wait, and an Ephemeral Rollup is how these teams got their update loop down to a tick rate instead of a block time.
The second is randomness. Loot tables, coin flips, and seeding all need a number nobody at the table can predict or grind, which is what MagicBlock VRF supplies, and three of the four winners used it rather than rolling their own.
Herd adds a third with the Private Ephemeral Rollup, where the state itself stays hidden until it settles. Any game with a hidden move, a sealed bid, or a face-down card has the same problem, and that is a wider set of games than party trivia.
The four winners each put a different share of the game in the rollup, from a fully onchain party game to a three-year-old MMORPG that delegated only its duel arena and left the rest of the world where it was.
What does Blitz v8 say about the hackathon format?
MagicBlock says 36 builders from 11 countries shipped in one week, in what it calls the first Startup Village Blitz, and that more than 330 projects have now been built with MagicBlock across nine Blitz editions.
Thirty-six projects in a week is a modest number next to a Colosseum-scale hackathon. Three of the four winners shipped a link you can click and play right now, and the fourth is a mobile game.
A three-year MMORPG project entering a one-week hackathon to ship its duel arena on an Ephemeral Rollup is a real game studio treating MagicBlock as infrastructure rather than a prize pool, and that is the adoption MagicBlock needs more than it needs another 36-project week.