State channels, made into three gamesState channels, made into three games

Bram Cohen, who started Chia after inventing BitTorrent, wanted people to play games of skill against each other for real money, in real time, with no casino in the middle and no way for whoever loses to skip out on paying. His team built it on state channels. Opening a game and settling it each take a transaction on the chain, about a minute, and every move in between happens off it, so only the first and last step ever touch the chain.

He wanted to show the idea as three games, and what existed was a page of wasm and Rust behind a single input field, hard going even for engineers. Chia's engineering lead told me Bram needed help with his UX and UI, and put the two of us together. I gave the games a design language, prototyped them and helped build them into Chia's codebase, and the idea became three games anyone could understand.