CCP Games and Sui announced an $80,000 prize pool for the Eve Frontier hackathon for 2026.
CCP Games is holding the Eve Frontier × Sui Hackathon 2026, an online hackathon, on March 11 to March 31 2026. The hackathon invites builders to create mods running on Smart Assemblies – configurable in-game structures such as turrets, stargates, and storage units – or outside the game through external applications connected to the same live universe.
Eve Frontier demonstrates the unique power of the Sui blockchain — supporting galactic-scale battles, true ownership, and persistent worlds through a large-scale moddable infrastructure.
Designed as a moddable survival universe, players can meaningfully shape their experience as they rebuild civilization from its ashes. Players can change how the world behaves through mods that stay active over time, can be expanded by others, and continue to affect the shared universe across the entire galaxy.
Announcement Trailer: https://youtu.be/4nlMjQif2hE
Mods can live inside the Eve Frontier game world by running within Smart Assemblies: player-built, in-game structures such as storage units, gates, and defensive systems. These structures, powered by Sui’s blockchain-enforced modding and co-creation, act as the physical hosts for player creativity, allowing for new logic and behavior to be installed within them, while able to be interacted with, defended or destroyed by other players.
Mods can also live outside the game, as external applications that connect to Eve Frontier through an official API. These external tools, such as maps, dashboards, coordination platforms, and analytics services, do not exist as objects in space, but can also read and react to live game data in real time.
With the theme ‘A Toolkit for Civilization’ the 2026 Hackathon asks players to create mods from the supportive to the bizarre. Entries can be deployed into the live server, where players can use them as part of the judging process, and with the community vote playing a key role in deciding the winners.
“Eve Frontier is built on the idea that a virtual world shouldn’t be static,” said Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games. “This is the next step in game modding: where builders aren’t just modding a client or a tool, but modding the server itself in real time, through systems that are designed to be extended. The Hackathon is an invitation to explore what happens when modding becomes part of a live universe.”
“Eve Frontier is designed to be built by players, not just played by them,” said Adeniyi Abiodun, chief product officer at Mysten Labs, the original contributors to Sui, in a statement. “Our goal is to provide the infrastructure to build ‘forever games,’ moddable worlds that can keep evolving. While Eve and Sui provide the foundation, it’s the builders who drive innovation. I speak for both CCP and Mysten Labs when I say we can’t wait to see what participants in this hackathon will create.”
The hackathon is open globally to individuals and teams of up to five participants. Full details on registration, timelines, submission requirements, and modding resources are available at: http://deepsurge.xyz/evefrontier2026
CCP is a leading independently operated game developer that has been praised for its artistry, technology and game design that facilitates emergent behavior, empowering players with compelling means of self-expression. Founded in 1997 on the principle of pushing the envelope and breaking new ground on all levels, CCP is on a mission to create virtual worlds more meaningful than real life.
With the launch of Eve Online in May 2003, CCP established itself as a pioneer of cutting-edge massively multiplayer games, winning numerous awards and receiving critical acclaim worldwide. CCP is headquartered in Reykjavik, Iceland, and has additional studios in London and Shanghai.
Eve Frontier is an online space survival game. You awake from stasis as the last relic of humanity from a lost age. Civilization has decayed in the ruin of its ambition, feral drone swarms scour its wastes, and survivors fight to gain control over its resources. In the shadow of the Trinary, who will you become?
Pétursson said the hackathon is the fourth one for Eve Frontier over the past two years or so, with a few hundred people doing the hackathons.
“We are getting better and better at the hackathons. Now we are doing it for the first time since we posted to Sui,” Pétursson said.
The company has been porting the game over to Sui for the past six months. There are cool feature in Sui’s Move language.
“It’s a really solid architecture, and the language brings very unique performance characteristics. We’re actually anticipating quite a lot of it when it comes to the hackathon,” Pétursson said. “Up until now, this has mostly been like engineers in the hackathon. But we now see that fairly non-technical people being able to build on top of the modding platform with AI coating.”
Pétursson added, “This is actually pretty phenomenal. We can democratize this quite a bit for who can build on the platform, which is very exciting. We are working a little bit with calling this modding 3.0.”
CCP can get the community to build a new game on the platform and CCP has taken advantage of how smart contracts work to begin with, he said. He said that multiple people can work without permissions on the backend of the same game.
“We have seen people implement whole new game modes into the game, where people are building structured mini games using the physics of the game and all of that is in singl-sharded MMOs.
As for Sui’s value, Pétursson said, “The mobile language that Sui uses is a very strong language. So the coating with that with agents, actually is even better than a less strongly typed language. Then what Sui does is they do a lot of what is called static analysis to figure out where there are opportunities for parallelism, which actually gives quite a bit of performance to the chain, which we’ve definitely noticed as we’ve been moving frontier over so and then the kind of dev tooling.”
Pétursson said CCP has been building on various blockchains and even building its own blockchain since 2022.
“I’ve been doing distributed computing for 30 years. So this is just another flavor of that. If you look at Sui,” he said. “You can definitely see how that investment and all that benefit of hindsight that they have having started with the understanding of the general shape of the of the phenomenon. That definitely comes well through in how Sui works. I would call it a very technically capable platform.”
Pétursson said he will see how the platform has evolved with the hackathon. The Sui porting work will be released in March, Pétursson said.
There will also be a major update to the game coming in March, coinciding with the hackathon.
“I personally am very excited about. We’ve been working a lot on direct flight of the spaceship. As you may recall, Eve is more point and click when you are flying the spaceship. But now we have done controls which work well on a gamepad and a joystick,” Pétursson said. “In March, I am extremely excited to be playing that on a live server with the players and get the feedback from everyone. It truly is a game changer for the experience.”
As for blockchain itself, Pétursson said it is like other tech. It is all very slow going until somebody really comes to a breakthrough. He noted there wasn’t much going on with AI until ChatGPT 3.5 came out.
“Until somebody nails a use case, then people are maybe disillusioned about it,” Pétursson said.
I asked what kind of features have been created. Pétursson said one player built a star kit where they coded it so that a player could open the star kit by delivering the corpse of his mortal enemy.
“We would never think of doing that, having a corpse as a key to stargates,” he said. “This is the magic for this kind of modding. Players really have the wildest ideas, and it’s been truly inspiring to see, and I am very excited to see.”