Inspiration
Online competitive gaming is a hostile experience. When you get matched with a stranger, there's no social consequence for toxic behavior. This encourages harassment and cyberbullying. Game providers like Valve, Riot, and Epic each know what players you encounter, but none of them share that data, and none of it belongs to you. This framework provides players a cross-game identity that they own where your reputation, trust network, and match history live on a blockchain, separate from any singular game company.
What it does
PlayerGraph is a decentralized network that tracks every player you encounter across CS2, Valorant, and Fortnite. It tracks the games you played together, the ratings your friends gave them, and trust warnings if someone in your network flagged them. When you enter a lobby, you immediately see cross-game history and peer reputation for every player, even strangers your friends have played with before. Every match and every rating is anchored to the PlayerGraph Chain - a SHA-256 proof-of-work blockchain - and the entire chain state is periodically anchored to the Bitcoin Testnet via OP_RETURN. This makes the history tamper-evident and timestamped against the public ledger. Players can also tip each other sats directly in the lobby over the Lightning Network, if they are exceptionally friendly or helpful.
How we built it
- Node.js/Express API backend
- sql.js SQLite for the local, centralized demo
- React + Vite, React Query frontend
- anchored blocks
- match (players, match score, date)
- rating (player ids, rating)
- Lightning Network for tipping other players
- Testnet for testing with bitcoin
Challenges we ran into
- Learning blockchain & bitcoin
- Building a cross-provider identity to handle the unique usernames/ids across each game provider
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Built a framework that could integrate with Valve, Riot Games, Epic Games' products.
- Implemented a working proof-of-work blockchain, with ECDSA-signed rating blocks and a live Block Explorer
- Anchored real chain state to the Bitcoin Testnet via OP_RETURN
- Built Lightning Network tipping into the lobby UI with real LND invoice generation and payment polling
What we learned
- How blockchain works
- Using bitcoin to anchor truth in a blockchain
What's next for PlayerGraph
- Integrate with the Steam Web API, Riot Games API, and Epic Games API to pull real match data, show trust system in-game for users
- Establish a Peer to Peer network across users and game providers so multiple nodes can replicate the chain
- Integrate into game provider's matchmaking systems so they get paired with people their network has rated as friendly
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.