BitChess

I play chess most days, usually an hour or so. At some point I started playing friends for small stakes, and it changed the game completely. You think twice before a careless move. You actually sit and calculate. It is the same game and it is not the same game at all. That is where BitChess came from.

The hard part was never the chess. It was everything around the money. I wanted people to turn up, find a game, play, and get paid, without being asked to understand a wallet or a network or a token first. So all of that sits behind a switch. If you want to see what is happening underneath, you can turn it on and watch every detail. If you do not, you never meet it. You just play chess.

Underneath, the money moves on an Ethereum layer 2 using account abstraction. That part is what makes this feel normal now rather than awkward, and it is the bit I find most interesting. For a long time crypto insisted on being the thing you looked at. It works far better as the thing holding everything up from behind, where nobody has to notice it.