Background
RedFoo — a Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum artist — had by 2022 become a Web3 coder and enthusiast for Scrypto, Radix's asset-oriented smart-contract language, despite having been coding for only around three months. For FooHack he handpicked a group of competition-winning programmers, dubbed the FooCrew, most of whom had never met before the event.
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 same "chess on the ledger" idea had first appeared as an internal experiment at the Radix Team Hackathon in 2019.
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 reports of university students spending an entire semester building a chess game in Solidity on Ethereum — 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.
