About Protocol Pawns
What is Protocol Pawns?
Protocol Pawns is the very first fully decentralized on-chain chess game built on NEAR Protocol. Every move is recorded on-chain, every game is verifiable, and there are no centralized servers controlling your games.
How to Play
Connect your NEAR wallet and register with a one-time storage deposit of 0.05 N.
Challenge another player by entering their account ID, or start a game against the AI with three difficulty levels:
- Easy — casual play, low gas (~8 TGas)
- Medium — balanced challenge (~30 TGas)
- Hard — strong opponent (~110 TGas)
Click or drag pieces on the board. Each move is a signed on-chain transaction. The contract validates all moves so you can't cheat.
Earn points for every game you play and win. Your ELO rating is tracked on-chain. Climb the leaderboard!
Features
- - Fully on-chain chess with move validation
- - Challenge any NEAR account to a game
- - Play against AI (Easy / Medium / Hard)
- - ELO rating system stored on-chain
- - Points earned for playing and winning
- - Push notifications for your turn
- - Wager tokens on games (coming soon)
Smart Contract
The chess engine runs entirely inside the NEAR smart contract at app.chess-game.near. It validates legal moves, detects checkmate and stalemate, and emits NEP-297 events for every game action.
Tech Stack
- - Contract: Rust on NEAR Protocol
- - Indexer: GoldSky (NEP-297 event pipeline)
- - API: Cloudflare Workers + Hyperdrive (PostgreSQL)
- - Frontend: SvelteKit + Svelte 5 + UnoCSS
- - Wallet: @hot-labs/near-connect