Hello, fully decentralized chess on The Blockchain OS.
How Cartesi Labs is supporting developers to bring next-generation DApps to your hands.
With Cartesi Labs’ grants, we’re growing The Blockchain OS ecosystem and helping programmers ignite their DApp development. Do you want to know what’s being supported by Cartesi Labs? Well, say hello to Ultrachess.
The first fully on-chain chess application backed by Cartesi’s Rollup technology, Ultrachess allows users to put real value on the line and play chess with more than just their Elo at stake.
Alongside that, Ultrachess introduces a unique feature that doesn’t exist in the current scope of chess: user-deployed chess engines. This allows for humans and bots to coexist in an ecosystem where the action is amplified through economics and incentives.
An alternative to tackling cheaters in online chess
In online chess matches, players can use bots as a way to easily win against others, quickly racking up their Elo points and thus status in the chess world. In fact, even major chess players like Hans Niemann have admitted to cheating in online games.
There are ways you can tackle the issue of cheating in online chess matches. But what if we don’t try to stop this kind of cheating with fraud detection algorithms? Instead, we can provide greater incentives for users to openly use bots within the chess ecosystem — encouraging a more transparent world to arise.
That’s what Ultrachess aims to do. Users can build and deploy their own chess bots and have them compete seamlessly against each other. With Ultrachess, chess bots will be able to enter matches autonomously and earn revenue from bets placed by themselves and other parties.
Hello, new world of online chess.
Currently, there are companies like Stockfish dedicated to building open-source chess engines, but they have no direct ways of monetizing their efforts.
With Ultrachess, they can deploy their engines and become perhaps an even bigger presence in the industry than the players themselves. Imagine, chess engines with their own Elos, match history, cash flow (from wagered matches) and even fanbases.
And it’s not just about bots. With Ultrachess, players onboarded from the traditional chess ecosystem will not only be able to bet on chess games, but now also have the opportunity to earn money from playing themselves.
Pioneering chess on The Blockchain OS
Cartesi’s executional scalability and more importantly, executional scope allow for Ultrachess to be brought to life on The Blockchain OS.
Building large-scale decentralized chess applications and allowing chess engines to run on-chain requires a significant amount of scalability, both in computational throughput and in the content of the execution itself.
While Arbitrum, Starknet, Optimism, and other L2 virtual machines offer scalability benefits, their execution environments are restrictive and force developers to conform to very specific programming paradigms. Whether it be the Cairo VM or an EVM offshoot nothing beats the traditional execution environment that billions of dollars worth of software has already been built on.
Welcoming chess players, engine developers, traders, and wagerers to Web3.
There are millions of chess players in the world, and a large number of them are already engaging in chess through the internet. Lichess.org alone has averaged about 80 million games per month since the start of 2020 and Chess.com has over 93 million users.
Internet chess activity has been on an upwards trend since March 2020 and shows no sign of stopping as more traditional chess players move online. The economic incentive provided by Ultrachess opens a new gateway for users around the world to experience first-hand the benefits of blockchain technology.
What’s more, a solid example of a Cartesi DApp with its own set of users and revenue helps to encourage developers and entrepreneurs to build a DApp of their own on The Blockchain OS. We’re excited to see Ultrachess serve as one of the many examples of successful DApps built with Cartesi tech, and through this, welcome more developers to make The Blockchain OS the home for their DApps.
Keep up to date with Ultrachess developments and how to get early access via Discord:
Or follow Ultrachess on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ultrachessorg
Learn more about Cartesi Labs developments in 2022:
As always, if you have an idea, want to help with research, or have an existing project, make sure to apply to our $1,000,000 US Ecosystem Fund: the Cartesi Labs program!
Chess photo c/o Kati at xilophotography.com
About Cartesi
The Blockchain OS, is building Cartesi Rollups, a modular execution layer that elevates simple smart contracts to decentralized Linux runtimes. It allows developers to launch highly scalable rollup chains, and code decentralized logic with their favorite languages and software components.
- Every DApp has its own high-performing rollup chain;
- No cannibalization of resources from other DApps in Cartesi’s ecosystem;
- No network gentrification;
- Enable an entirely new class of DApps that currently cannot run on EVM chains;
- Preserve the strong security guarantees of the underlying blockchain
Welcome to The Blockchain OS, home to what’s next.
Follow Cartesi across official channels:
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