Mempool Space Invaders: Shoot Whales, Stack Sats, or Just Wire Yourself $730M

If you've ever dreamed of combining your mediocre Space Invaders skills with the soul-crushing volatility of Bitcoin, boy do we have a game for you. A new free-to-play Bitcoin game will pay someone a BTC bounty if they're skilled at old-school arcade games, lucky enough to play while lots of Bitcoin is being transacted on the blockchain, or willing to move a ton of BTC to help grease the wheels.

Enter Mempool Space Invaders, where players are challenged to shoot down Bitcoin "whales" that fall through the screen towards their ship like cosmic revenge for every time you've FOMO'd at the top. Each whale represents a real transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain, and upon being blasted by the player, it adds the quantity of BTC from each transaction to the player's score. Miss the whale and your shields will slowly deteriorate until you've lost the game—like watching your portfolio bleed in real time, but with more pixelated spaceships.

For those times when your reflexes are betraying you harder than a Saturday night tequila decision, you can choose to start over for free—or pay 1,000 sats (about $0.73 worth of Bitcoin) to continue your previous run. That's right, you too can experience the luxury of buying back into a losing position, just with smaller amounts and more pixelated aliens.

Now for the part that made every degen in the group chat perk up: the first player to destroy 10,000 BTC in the game—representing some $730 million worth of real Bitcoin transactions—will earn a bounty of 10,000 sats, or about $7.30 in BTC from pseudonymous developer Jasonb. Yes, you read that correctly. Destroy $730 million worth of Bitcoin transactions to win approximately the price of a decent lunch. The ROI on this is... let's just say it's not why people play video games.

Taking home the bounty requires serious skill and luck, a combination usually only found in people who YOLO their savings into meme coins at 2 AM. Players must shoot down all the whales, many of which fall simultaneously, making it difficult to stay alive for long. If you're lucky enough, you might play while large Bitcoin transactions are taking place on the blockchain, allowing you to destroy larger whales and stack bigger quantities of BTC in a short period of time. It's basically being rewarded for being online at the exact moment a whale decides to move their life savings.

But there's another way to win, according to the developer—though it'll require the ability to move a massive amount of crypto. "The people's approach," said the developer in a post outlining the game, is to "throw up a 10,000 Bitcoin transaction to yourself and wait for it to show up." Then blast it out of the water—er—space," they explained. "Just make sure not to spend too much in fees, or you'll eat up all your winnings." Solid financial advice, honestly.

Of course, not everyone has $730 million in Bitcoin laying around to win the game—unlike certain Terraform Labs executives, apparently. As an alternative, the developer cheekily suggested trying "two 5,000 Bitcoin transactions." "Just make sure that they are broadcast close enough together that you can shoot both of them in the same game," they added in the footnotes. For those keeping track at home, that's still $365 million in transactions. Very normal. Very doable.

If you don't want to risk sending $730 million on the blockchain like some kind of absolute madlad, you can try to play it out like some in the Stacker News comments, where one user said they were able to destroy a "paltry 70 BTC," and another only 30 BTC after 20 minutes of trying. Truly humbling results that should make all of us reconsider our gaming career prospects.

Anyone that actually completes the initiative will need to share a screenshot of their "game over" screen to unlock the bounty. If they put in the "effort to fake that," the sats reward is "deserved," the game's author wrote. Honestly, if you're willing to fake a screenshot of destroying $730 million in Bitcoin transactions for $7.30, you deserve the sats AND a career in Hollywood.

Bitcoin is up 1.3% in the last 24 hours, slightly increasing the game's bounty in the process as it trades around $73,198. The top crypto asset has jumped more than 9.5% in the last week, but still sits 42% below its all-time high of $126,080. So basically, the bounty is worth slightly more than it was yesterday, which is more than most of our portfolios can say.