About BitChess

Public chess challenges for a stake. Post a challenge for any amount, anyone can accept, and the winner takes the pot. The chess happens on Lichess; BitChess handles the matchmaking and the money.

Why Lichess does the judging

The hardest problem in staked chess is not moving money, it is deciding who won and whether they won honestly. We do not attempt to solve that. Every BitChess game is a real game on Lichess, and we read the result from them, along with their anti-cheat marks.

Games are rated on Lichess by default, with a per-challenge toggle for casual play. Rated games only count when both players are authenticated, which is why logging in asks permission to create challenges on your behalf. Your Lichess rating for the relevant speed is shown on your profile and on every challenge you post.

Where your stake actually sits

When someone accepts your challenge, both stakes move into an escrow contract in a single transaction. Neither player can withdraw them, and neither can we. When the game finishes, a settler reads the result and pays the winner from the contract, working from chain state rather than from our own records, with both browsers closed.

The contract can take a fee, capped at ten percent and currently set to zero. The winner's payout shown on a challenge is read from the chain rather than assumed, so it is what the contract will actually pay. When the fee cannot be read, no figure is shown at all instead of a guessed one.

A draw returns both stakes. So does an aborted game, or one that never gets underway. A challenge nobody accepts expires after five minutes with nothing staked.

Your account, and the one permission we hold

Your BitChess account is a smart account created for you the first time you set up to play. It is secured by a passkey held on your own device, using your fingerprint, face or device PIN. That passkey is the account's administrator and it never reaches our servers.

We hold one permission, granted by you and enforced by the chain: it can move a stake into escrow when you accept or post a challenge, and it can do nothing else. It cannot withdraw your balance, send it anywhere, or raise its own limit. You can revoke it.

The trade-off worth understanding before you play: because we do not hold your keys, we cannot recover your account for you. Losing the device and the passkey means losing access to whatever is in the account.

USDV, vibenet, and what “test network” means

Stakes are denominated in USDV on vibenet, Base's preview network. USDV has no cash value. You cannot buy it, you cannot sell it, and nothing you win here can be turned into money. We hand you some when you sign up so there is something to play for.

vibenet is explicitly experimental. Base says its state may be reset without notice, and a reset would wipe every balance on it. Accounts themselves survive, because their addresses are derived deterministically and would be the same address on other networks, but the balances do not. That is the honest reason to run here rather than on real money: the rules are still being proved, and this is the place to prove them where a bug costs nobody anything.

What is not built yet

Disputes and a deeper anti-cheat story are the next serious piece of work, and they come before real money rather than after it. Until then, the honest summary is that BitChess is a working system running on a test network with a small number of players, and it is being built in the open.