Background
RedFoo – a Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum artist – had by 2022 become a Web3 coder and an enthusiast for Scrypto, Radix's asset-oriented smart-contract language. He had been introduced to Scrypto only three months before the hackathon, which RDX Works presented as the point of the exercise: a beginner in the language climbing the learning curve in public. For FooHack he handpicked three competition-winning programmers, and the four of them — dubbed the FooCrew — had, on RDX Works' account, been strangers the week before.
What Was Built
Over three days the FooCrew built a chess engine that runs on a public ledger: it enforced the full rules of chess, supported player-versus-player games, and minted each final board state as an on-ledger asset – an NFT put up for auction. The work was split into five streams — the front end, the chess engine, the auction components, NFT minting, and one person to stitch the pieces together — with RedFoo himself taking the auction components. The same "chess on the ledger" idea had first appeared as an internal experiment at the Radix Team Hackathon in 2019, though that build enforced the rules through board and move Particles on the pre-Babylon ledger and had no resource model with which to mint the result.
Scrypto Significance
RedFoo praised the Rust-based, asset-oriented language, coining the line that gave the accompanying blog post its title: "Coding in Scrypto is as smooth as vegan butter." RDX Works contrasted the FooCrew's three-day build against a student project at the Technical University of Berlin, which it said had spent an entire semester attempting a chess game in Solidity on Ethereum without finishing it – attributing the difference to Scrypto's buckets-and-vaults model for handling resources natively. FooHack sat alongside the Scrypto Developer Event and Scrypto DeFi Challenge in Radix's push to grow the Scrypto developer community.
