Whitepaper

Executive Summary

SkillClassics is a competitive gaming platform for the games we know and love — Chess, Backgammon, Gin Rummy, Go — played for real entry fees against opponents from anywhere in the world.

Two things make us different. First: entry fees sit in the escrow smart contract, not in a SkillClassics account, until you claim your prize or refund. Entry fees go directly to the contract. Earnings are paid out automatically by the contract, not by us. Second: the games are skill games, played on the board you already know, with no in-game tokens, no loot boxes, and nothing random beyond the game's own dice and shuffle.

Play is free on Ethereum Sepolia and BSC Testnet, where no real funds are at risk. BNB Chain is live. Entry fees are real and you can lose them, so they are capped at the micro tier: an independent third-party audit has not yet been completed, and until it is we would rather limit what you can put at risk than lift the cap early. Ethereum mainnet follows, then Solana.

The Problem

The current competitive gaming landscape sits at two unhappy extremes:

The big incumbents have great products, but they hold your money. Funds can be frozen. Withdrawals can take weeks. Accounts can be closed without explanation. You are a depositor, not a player, and the platform is your bank.

Most Web3 gaming projects, by contrast, focus on tokens and speculation rather than the games themselves. The experience is rough, the communities are thin, and the games are usually not games we actually want to play.

The Solution

SkillClassics combines the polish of a serious competitive platform with the trust model of a smart contract.

Bankless

You connect a wallet (MetaMask, WalletConnect, Coinbase, Rainbow) — or sign in with Google, X, or email and we provision a wallet for you. Each match's entry fee goes straight to the contract for that match, not to us. The winner claims directly from the contract — most claims settle in a single transaction, and a small number pass through an Integrity Review before release.

The Lobby

A clean, filterable, real-time view of every open match and tournament across all the games we support — from $0.50 friendly contests to higher-tier matches. Find the format you want, click in, play.

Skill First

In Chess and Go, nothing inside the game is random. The board is the board, the rules are the rules. Where games genuinely require randomness (backgammon dice, gin rummy shuffle), we use a cryptographic commitment scheme — see below. In tournaments of three or more players, byes and first-round pairings are drawn at random; that decides who plays whom, never the result of a game.

Multi-Chain

You play on the chain you prefer. We deploy the same contract suite to multiple EVM chains and accept the standard stablecoins.

What You Can Play

Chess. Clocks of 3, 5, 10, 20 or 30 minutes per player, with no increment (scheduled events set their own clock). Full server-side move validation, including en passant and castling, and full time-control enforcement.

Backgammon. Standard play with bear-off mechanics, bar entry and committed dice rolls.

Gin Rummy. Standard, Straight Gin or Oklahoma variants (the table creator picks), best-of-five matches. Knock, gin, and big gin scoring. Undercut bonuses. Real-time meld display.

Go (Baduk). Chinese (area) or Japanese (territory) scoring, chosen by the table creator. 9×9, 13×13, and 19×19 board sizes. The oldest strategy game in our collection — and a game with no randomness inside it.

Coming next: more classic skill games — we announce each one when it is ready to play.

How It Works

The five-step settlement flow for a head-to-head match:

1. Player A pays the entry fee to the match contract.
2. Player B pays the entry fee to the same contract. Funds are now locked.
3. The game begins. Every move is validated server-side.
4. The game ends. The platform produces a signed result.
5. The winner submits the signed result to the contract, which verifies the signature and releases the prize, minus the service fee.

The takeaway: two wallets fund the contract, and the entry fees sit in that contract, not in a SkillClassics account, until the prize is claimed.

For tournaments, players register one at a time, the bracket auto-starts when full, and prizes are paid out the same way at the end.

Fair Randomness

For games that involve randomness — backgammon dice, the gin rummy shuffle — we use a cryptographic commitment scheme. Before the game starts, we publish a commitment to the random outcome. The committed value is recorded with the match result, so a result can't be influenced or changed after the fact.

Because the outcome is locked in before play begins, you don't have to trust us — the commitment is the guarantee.

Security & Trust

Continuously reviewed. Our smart contracts and platform undergo repeated internal security review — static analysis, invariant and property-based testing, adversarial verification and automated red-team runs — and we publish the findings and their remediation status. These are internal, AI-assisted reviews, not a third-party audit. An independent third-party audit has not yet been completed; until it is, entry fees stay capped at the micro tier. See our Security Audit page for the current picture.

Non-custodial by design. Match funds live in smart contracts that we wrote and that are publicly viewable. The platform produces signed match results; the contract decides whether to release funds. Two rules can affect a claim: the 30-day claim window set out in our Terms, and the Integrity Review described above, which can hold or void a claim before release.

Compliance. Every login and every fund-touching action is screened against the OFAC sanctions list, refreshed daily. The platform is operated by SkillClassics DAO LLC (Wyoming, USA).

Your session, your wallet. Sessions are managed via secure HttpOnly cookies — no auth tokens are stored where a malicious script could read them. If you sign in with a social account, the wallet we provision for you is yours and non-custodial; you control the keys.

Entry fees and prize pools are held by security-reviewed escrow contracts. Contract addresses for each network are shown in-app and on the Smart Contracts page.

Patent pending (AP 2026 17028). Core elements of our settlement architecture are the subject of a pending patent application.

Multi-Chain

You choose your chain. We deploy the same contract suite to each.

Native coins are held and paid out directly by the escrow — hold ETH or BNB and you compete in that coin, with no wrapping step and no wrapped-token contract in the settlement path. Stablecoin contests use USDC (and USDT where available).

Service Fee

SkillClassics charges a small service fee on each contest. The fee is built into the entry fee and is calculated on-chain by the FeeManager contract — there is no hidden charge.

Entry fees are capped at $5 until an independent third-party audit completes, so only the first two rows apply today. Entries paid in the chain's native coin (BNB) carry a flat 5%. The rate is set by the entry amount for matches and tournaments alike. Fees settle in the same token as the entry — a stablecoin or the native coin, never a wrapped token. There is no SkillClassics token, and there are no plans to launch one.

Where We Are

Play is free on Ethereum Sepolia and BSC Testnet. BNB Chain is live. Entry fees are real and you can lose them, so they are capped at the micro tier: an independent third-party audit has not yet been completed, and until it is we would rather limit what you can put at risk than lift the cap early. Ethereum mainnet follows, then Solana.

Already shipped

• Four games — Chess, Backgammon, Gin Rummy, Go — full PvP lifecycle
• Smart contract escrow for both head-to-head matches and tournaments
• The same contract suite deployed across BNB Chain and two public testnets
• Tournament system with single-elimination brackets, auto-start, and tiered prize distribution
• Scheduled tournaments — register ahead of time, automatic bracket start at the set time
• Cancel + refund for matches that can't start
• Wallet sign-in (MetaMask, WalletConnect, Coinbase, Rainbow) and social/email sign-in (Google, X, email OTP)
• Real-time gameplay with reconnect-on-drop
• Multi-table view with turn notifications
• Cryptographically committed randomness
• Move-by-move game replay and review for all four games (PGN export for Chess)
• Optional two-factor authentication (2FA) via authenticator app
• In-app bug reporting with an optional screenshot
• ELO leaderboards, profiles, chat, forum
• Repeated internal security reviews and red-team passes, with published findings

Coming next

• An independent third-party audit, after which the entry-fee cap is reviewed
• More games, more chains, and a better mobile experience

The Vision

We are not building a "crypto game." We are building the future of competitive board gaming.

By removing the need for trust, we open the door to global, high-level competition without borders or banking restrictions. Whether you are a Grandmaster competing at the highest tier or a casual player looking for a $5 contest, SkillClassics is the arena.