The problem Stoa solves

Most online Q&A platforms suffer from:
• Low-quality answers — little incentive to contribute thoughtful responses.
• No skin in the game — answers cost nothing, so spam and shallow takes flood the feed.
• Unfair recognition — the best ideas often get buried under noise or popularity bias.

Stoa fixes this by:
• Requiring players to pay to answer, filtering out low-effort responses.
• Using AI adjudication to fairly judge the best answers.
• Distributing token rewards to winners, making knowledge directly valuable.

What you can use it for
• In the classroom to incentivize participation
• Running high-signal Q&A rounds for communities, DAOs, and creators.
• Turning ordinary discourse into a game with rewards and fairness baked in.

Challenges I ran into

One of the biggest hurdles was coordinating onchain and offchain timing. Ending a question requires an onchain transaction and a database update, which led to race conditions when multiple users tried to end it at the same time. The workaround was to make question endings purely user-driven with an onchain lock, so only the first transaction succeeds and others revert.

AI judging needed to be trustable. Letting anyone finalize results wasn’t safe, so we moved to a whitelist of judges (AI agents + approved accounts) to ensure fairness while still keeping it decentralized over time.

Smart Contract Address(es)

Factory
https://basescan.org/address/0x56Ee1dAb5b0CB673D25C4893FBE8253b08112658

Example question
https://basescan.org/address/0x1ed5a0ef3d37422fc709b1b27b9a7738680a5064