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Core principle

On-chain = ownership & catalog. Off-chain = all gameplay.
The smart contracts only ever answer two questions: what skills/skins exist (the catalog) and who owns which ones (ownership). Everything about actually playing a match (turn order, calling numbers, validating a drafted board, executing skill effects, detecting a win) happens on the game server, and the game server only ever reads the chain; it never writes to it during a match.

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System diagram

The boundary between layers is enforced by the compiler, not just documentation:
  • Frontend ↔ Server: the web client imports its types directly from @thebingofi/protocol (Socket.IO events + HTTP response shapes) and @thebingofi/engine (the same board validation logic the server runs). The server is compiled against the same types, so any drift is a build error, not a runtime surprise.
  • Backend/Frontend ↔ Contracts: ABIs and addresses live in packages/chain (abi/*.ts as-const modules and deployments/91342.ts), generated from the contract source by contracts/export-artifacts.sh, never hand-written.
  • The only path that ever mints a token: the frontend calls Marketplace.buy() with ETH. The Marketplace mints through SkillCollection, which fires a Purchased and a TransferSingle event. The server then refreshes that wallet’s entitlement, and the skill becomes usable in a loadout. See Smart Contracts for the full sequence.

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Server authoritative, client untrusted

Every rule of the game is re-validated server-side: whose turn it is, whether a called number was already called, whether a submitted board is a valid 5×5 permutation of 1-25, whether a skill use is legal (right turn, charge remaining, valid target cell), and win detection. The client never gets to assert any of this on its own.

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Board redaction (anti-cheat)

MatchView (the payload broadcast to clients during a match) is built per-socket, not once per room, specifically so that a viewer only ever receives their own board:
  • board in MatchView contains only the viewer’s own board. An opponent’s board is never present in any payload, for any player, at any point in the match.
  • The same redaction applies to loadout, daubedCells (Wild Daub targets), and ghostNumbers (Ghost Call targets); each is scoped strictly to the viewer.
  • pendingSkill (which skill is awaiting a Nullify decision, and from whom) is public to the room, but deliberately omits the skill’s args (e.g. which cell a Wild Daub targeted): enough to render “opponent used X, respond?” without leaking board contents.
  • A bot’s board follows the exact same redaction rules as a human’s. To the engine, a bot is just another MatchPlayer, so there’s no special-cased leak path.

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Identity & persistence

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Stable account identity

identity:hello gives every player a stable accountId that survives across matches, rooms, and reconnects, as long as the client retains the opaque token it’s issued (the server stores only a hash of that token, never the plaintext, after the initial handshake). This is distinct from the ephemeral, per-room seat ID used for turn order; a client tracks both, for different purposes. A player who never calls identity:hello still gets a real (but ephemeral, non-resumable) account created automatically the first time one is needed.

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Postgres persistence (optional)

  • Player accounts, including linked wallet (players table)
  • Quest progress (quest_progress)
  • Daily Challenge scores (daily_scores)
  • Plaza chat history (plaza_messages)
DATABASE_URL is entirely optional. Without it, the server runs fully functional in an in-memory mode (this is also what local development and the test suite use by default). With it, a single dependency (pg, no ORM) connects to Postgres and four store implementations switch from in-memory to SQL-backed automatically.

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Chain reader (read-only)

A thin, dependency-injected layer (apps/server/src/chain/) is the only part of the server that ever talks to GIWA Sepolia, and it only ever reads:
  • Catalog reads: SkillRegistry.getSkill/nextSkillId back the GET /metadata/:id.json endpoint and loadout resolution.
  • Ownership reads: SkillCollection.balanceOfBatch backs verifyLoadout, called whenever a player sets a loadout in a standard-mode room (own wallet + active flag + maxPerLoadout, all checked against live chain state, not a cached indexer).
  • Address resolution: contract addresses are resolved in order: explicit REGISTRY_ADDRESS/COLLECTION_ADDRESS env vars (both must be set, or neither applies), then the deployment committed in @thebingofi/chain, then “not configured.” Because the contracts are already live on Sepolia and that deployment is committed, standard mode and the metadata endpoint work out of the box on a fresh checkout with no environment configuration at all.
There is currently no chain indexer/event listener. The server does live, per-request reads instead (e.g. a fresh balanceOfBatch call every time a loadout is set), so entitlements are always accurate, at the cost of an RPC round-trip instead of a cached index. See Smart Contracts for what the event table would back if an indexer is added later.