Fantasy500

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Inspiration

Fantasy sports are built for touchdowns and three-pointers, and we wanted the same energy for the market. Fantasy500 turns the S&P 500 into a league, where players can draft real tickers, set lineups, and compete on weekly price moves instead of box scores. We paired that with Solana to hold buy-ins, creating a competitive and fair experience for everyone. Finally, we deployed everything to the web using Vultr.

What it does

Leagues & drafts: Create leagues, invite friends, run snake drafts against the full S&P 500 universe.
Live market data: We have a live ticker strip and quote API pull real prices and daily % moves to immerse players in the action.
Wallet auth: Connect a Solana wallet with Phantom and sign in. Sessions are JWT-backed against a Rust API.
Real-time draft sync: WebSockets push draft updates so everyone sees picks as they happen.

How we built it

Backend: Rust (Axum) + MongoDB for leagues, teams, drafts, join requests, and scores.
Frontend: React, Vite, Tailwind, Solana wallet adapter (Phantom).
Market data: Server-side quote aggregation (batched requests, caching) so the UI stays snappy without exposing keys or hammering APIs from the browser.
Infra: API and WebSocket on one service; optional worker for scheduled scoring pipelines. CI/CD using Coolify and Vultr for live deployment.

Challenges we ran into

Public market APIs are flaky or rate-limited, so we had to intelligently pull ticket data.
Solana integration was tricky, especially because we wanted to test using devnet and not the main Solana chain (which would cost real money).
Scope vs. demo time. Our ambition was too big for the length of the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A cohesive product: a full loop from wallet -> league -> draft -> live tickers.
Polished landing and UX that reads “real app,” not only a hack.
Sensible architecture: Rust API, clear separation of real-time vs. REST, room to grow on-chain without rewriting the game.

What we learned

How to integrate wallet-based auth with a traditional API session model.
Practical lessons in caching and batching when every page load could mean hundreds of symbols.
That developer experience (clear errors, connection state, loading states) matters as much as features for judges and users.

What's next

On-chain verification: we currently use Solana for escrow but in future versions, we want to add blockchain verification for all transactions
Smarter scoring: weekly % return vs. price, historical baselines, and anti-abuse rules.
Mobile version: so that drafting is easier
Official data / paid tier if we outgrow free quote endpoints at scale.