The International Chess Federation (FIDE) and Ava Labs, a Web3 company in charge of building and promoting the Avalanche (AVAX) blockchain, have forged a long-term agreement to bring blockchain technology to the world of international chess. By publishing tournament information and player rankings on-chain and hosting tournament prize pools through AVAX, the partnership would enhance game integrity and operational efficiency for players and federations.
Over 500 million people play chess worldwide, and FIDE competitions like the World Chess Championship and Chess Olympiad draw hundreds of millions of viewers. Avalanche and Core (a self-custody crypto wallet) will be promoted as sponsors in FIDE competitions, such as the ongoing 2022 World Rapid and Blitz Championships, and they will contribute to FIDE’s product development to bring chess to Web3.
The chess community’s growing adoption of digital platforms and FIDE’s Web3 integrations herald the optimistic scope of the crypto industry. According to the federation, over 100 million players actively play online chess and engage in over 25 million virtual chess matches daily.
Although interest in Web3 and non-fungible tokens (NFT) has waned in the general public in recent months, federations like FIDE still consider that the market has the ability to advance their sport. In an attempt to expand the game, World Table Tennis (WTT), the organization that oversees tournaments for the sport, stated in August that it would be pursuing Web3 projects in collaboration with non-fungible token startup NFT Tech.
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The blockchain was selected by FIDE as a technical platform for its planned on-chain apps for chess players, according to an official announcement by the Avalanche team. Solutions that are avalanche-centric will be employed for tamper-proof experience tracking, transparent data processing, and other applications.
The major objectives of Avalanche’s technical solutions will be to leverage the subnet’s technology to demonstrate individualized experiences through public services, share tournament data on-chain, and compute official player rating on-chain. Avalanche intends to develop a FIDE game explorer as the next stage in the new partnership, which will be entirely run on on-chain data collected by Avalanche’s smart contracts.
