SOKAI
The future of football is in your backyard.
Created on 13th July 2025
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SOKAI
The future of football is in your backyard.
The problem SOKAI solves
SOKAI bridges the gap between video games and real-world football training. Today’s young athletes often lack structured, gamified tools to train at home while staying motivated. Parents are constantly looking for new ways to make their kids improve while competition gets intense and also want their kids to become a professional football player to achieve their “Projet Mbappé goal”
SOKAI turns real-life football drills into a fun, AI-tracked game experience, scoring performance, tracking progress, and rewarding effort via NFT player cards and on-chain points. It’s the first step toward a real-world football metagame, accessible with just a phone and a ball.
Challenges we ran into
Reducing AI latency for ball detection ⚽️
One of the biggest technical challenges was minimizing the latency of the ball detection AI. Young players expect immediate feedback when training, but processing video frames in real time while maintaining accuracy is demanding. We had to optimize our models and inference pipeline to make the experience feel seamless.
Reducing blockchain transaction latency on testnet ⚽️
On-chain actions, like minting NFT player cards and updating points, can introduce noticeable delays. Kids expect instant gratification, so we engineered an architecture that batches on-chain writes and uses fast off-chain caching to give immediate feedback while syncing to the blockchain in the background.
Building a smooth API-to-frontend connection 🔗
The frontend experience needed to feel responsive and fluid while relying on multiple APIs: AI recognition, blockchain, and progress tracking. Orchestrating these services and synchronizing states between server-side computation and client-side animations required a carefully designed communication layer and error-handling strategy.
Balancing fun and rigor
We had to find the right balance between a gamified, engaging experience that keeps kids motivated and serious football drills that actually improve their technique. Many apps lean too much toward entertainment without delivering measurable improvement.
Tracks Applied (2)