The problem CheckMayte solves

OneLiner Explaining Our Hack
Chess + Solana Blockchain + Customized NFTs = CheckMayte

The Problem Statement
In the last year, Chess has gained a lot of popularity online. However, most sites such as lichess, chess.com use centralized servers to manage users, games, the chess engines and whatnot. Also, other than ELO rating, these sites don't really have any ways for game winners to show off their games.

The Solution We Built
So we wondered what it would be like, if we made Chess completely decentralized and ran it as an dapp on the Solana blockchain! And that's just what this project is about. CheckMayte allows players to connect via Phantom wallet and play games of chess against each other, with state shared using SocketIO, but backed by the Solana blockchain!

In the world of NFTs, there is a lot of value in owning EndGame Boards of actual matches. eg. What would be like to own an NFT of the game played between Kasparov and Deep Blue? Or of the famous Magnus Carlsen vs. The World chess game? Hence, we decided to introduce an additional improvement that the winner of the game gets an NFT of the game board, which gets created WHEN the game ends (and which contains the entire gameplay of the game)!

If these NFTs are then sold, we believe it opens up a new avenue for superfans to possess the actual gameboards for games played by their favorite players, and on the other hand, these NFTs can be also used by Top GrandMasters as part of the portfolio, sort of like a historic signifier of an tremendous accomplishment tied to the blockchain for all eternity!

Challenges we ran into

More than anything, I think we took a lot of time on the E2E integration aspects to make this a smooth workflow. Each component in this system probably has some prior work around it (eg. We didn't need to write our own chess engine, just reused an open source one), but to put it all together in the span of this hackathon was quite challenging!