The problem Chain Count solves

Chain Count provides a simple, fun and competitive engagement tool inside Farcaster. It focuses on real-time social participation for a common global goal with minimal time effort, while encouraging its users to interact with the app again and again.

While the game is competitive (leaderboard of induvidual contributions), it encourages working on a common goal in the simplest way possible - incrementing a counter

Challenges I ran into

I had to get familiar with debugging a Farcaster app, which I hadn’t had any experience with before the hackathon. I got some help from other builders I met at a local Base workshop.

The main challenge was keeping the leaderboard accurate and up-to-date for all users, especially with concurrent increments.
My solution for this was to use Redis for atomic counter increments and leaderboard ranking, ensuring consistency even under heavy load.

Without safeguards, users could spam the increment action, undermining the leaderboard’s value.
I prevented this by implementing per-user cooldowns and checks to prevent rapid, repeated increments.