The first round of recent popular game Fomo3D has ended at 14:48 (GMT+8) August 22. 10,469 ETH was sent to the winner’s address. This lucky winner pocketed in nearly $3 million (at the time of writing) simply because he/she bought the last key of the round.

“That’s the largest legitimate on-chain jackpot in dApp history. Cool stuff. How high will this round go? Remember it’ll take everyone a couple days to realize the first one has ended!“ said Justo, Lead Designer at Team Just, developing team of Fomo3D.

Fomo3D is a Chinese crypto gaming project that is running on Ethereum. It is so popular in China that it quickly amassed 3,750 ETH in 10 days after it went online in early July.

The game is simple: when an individual is the last person to buy a Key (the in-game token), he/she will win the pot; while once someone buys a new Key, 30-second will be automatically added to the timer (up to a maximum of 24 hours). With each Key purchase during the round, the Key price increases a little bit until no one buys it and then the round is over, and the last one win the pot. Key holders then earn a percentage of all transaction volume, based on the amount of Keys they own.

This provides an incentive for people to put a lot of ETH into the contract early, thus increasing the amount in the pot and giving more of an incentive to people to try for the final key. Its creator boldly says it is a psychological social experiment in greed. And some greedy guy tries really hard to get the pot.

According to public information, the winner joined the game on August 15. After 6 days and 145 transactions, he stood out among hundreds of thousands of players and won the big pot with a total cost of only 0.8 ETH, 13,000x return on investment. The allegedly never-end game seems to end too soon, since everyone wants to stop others from being the lucky one. It triggers many tech savvys’ curiosity to investigate the secrets behind the ‘lucky’ guy.

Some hanky-panky was indeed found in it. In the last 3 minutes of the round when the guy purchased the last Keys, transactions in the 12 blocks were abnormally inactive, only one tenth of the averaged number, while transaction fees were dramatically hundreds of times higher.

That means, the guy deliberately caused the jam of Ethereum network with high transaction fees and tech means, which made it impossible for other players to successfully get in to buy Keys as miners were busy processing his highly-paid transactions.

A lottery-like game in the crypto space now turns out to be the game of hackers. The second round has started, more than 6,000 ETH has been accumulated in hours.