A ban costs nothing
A new email address, a new account, and they are back at your board within minutes. Identity is free, so the punishment is free. You cannot deter someone by taking away a thing that costs them nothing to replace.
Integrity
Cheating costs the cheater nothing. That is the actual problem.
Ask any serious online player what ruins chess and you get the same answer. The surprise is that the big platforms are not ignoring it. They close enormous numbers of accounts every month and their detection catches a great deal. What they cannot fix is what happens next.
Why bans do not work
Three structural failures, none of them technical
You get nothing back
You lost the game, the rating and an hour of your life. No platform in online chess has ever paid that back. There is no restitution anywhere in the sport, at any level, on any site.
The incentives point the wrong way
A subscription business earns from subscribers. Every ban is a lost customer; every wrongful ban is a lost customer and a public fight. Commercial pressure quietly favours caution.
None of that is a technology failure, and it is not fixed by writing a smarter detector. It is structural. We did not set out to catch more cheaters. We set out to make cheating not worth doing.
Running now
The part that is already in place
Two pieces of the answer do not depend on anything shipping later. They are how the app works today.
A result cannot be fabricated
The contract referees every move of a rated game and computes the result itself. Your browser only ever authors your own moves; it is never asked what happened. There is no version of the game that exists on somebody's server and nowhere else.
No centralised platform can offer this, because on a centralised platform the operator is always the last word.
Evidence you can actually check
Every move in a rated game carries a timestamp produced by the network rather than by us, recorded on chain as the move settles. Nobody can go back and edit it afterwards, ourselves included.
That matters because move timing is one of the clearest signals of engine assistance. On a centralised platform that data is private, unverifiable, and you are asked to take it on faith.
Designed, arriving with stakes
Making it cost something
These are specified and not switched on. They arrive with staked play, because they only mean anything when there is something at the table.
One human, one identity
Playing for stakes will require a verified identity through ITZA Vault. One person, one chess identity, permanently. If that identity is barred there is no second account, because there is no second you.
This single change does more than any detection algorithm. It turns a ban from an inconvenience into a real loss.
Cheaters pay the players they cheated
Staked players post a bond before they sit down. If cheating is proven, that bond is taken and paid out to the opponents they beat.
This has never existed in online chess, on any platform, at any level. If someone steals a game from you, you are made whole out of their money.
Verification that scales with what is at stake
Nobody should need a camera on to play a one dollar game. Nobody should play for serious money with no verification at all. A ladder of checks rises with the stakes, from basic identity up to recorded sessions and independently attested terminals.
You pick the level you are comfortable with, and you are only matched against players who meet it.
Judged in the open
Disputed games go to a panel of strong players who stake their own reputation on the ruling. The evidence is public, the ruling is recorded on chain, and it can be appealed and audited by anyone. Any player can report any game.
Compare that with the current standard: an automated email, no explanation, and an appeal that goes nowhere.
Plainly
What we are not doing
You should know what we ruled out, and why. Anyone who only tells you the good parts is selling you something.
We have not solved cheat detection
Nobody has. The best statistical work in the field, developed over two decades, could not clear its own threshold in the most famous cheating case in modern chess. Any platform telling you it catches everything is selling you something. We build for consequence, evidence and restitution instead of certainty.
We are not changing the rules of chess
Altering the game to confuse engines is a tempting idea and it does not work. Engines read the board in front of them and handle unusual positions natively. Every layer of complexity you add hurts the human more than the machine. Chess here is chess.
We are not asking you to become a trader
Putting a few dollars on a game should take one step and one card, not an exchange account and an afternoon. The technology is our problem to solve, not yours to learn.
We are not overstating our speed
The cluster settles a block in about a hundred milliseconds, and that is a real property of the network you can hold us to. What it is not is magic: no network on earth beats the speed of light, and how far you sit from a node still matters. We are not going to imply otherwise.
Play a game nobody can rewrite.
Every rated move is refereed and timestamped by the contract, not by a server you have to trust.