LockGrid

This is an interactive social gaming platform built to integrate directly with a major social media network. It allows users to challenge their followers to head-to-head competitive matches, turning casual online interactions into exciting skill-based battles.

While players compete, other followers can tune in to watch the matches live as spectators. A core feature is the ability for this audience to actively participate by placing bets on the outcome, turning passive viewers into engaged stakeholders.

The platform uses real-time communication protocols for seamless, instant interaction between players and spectators. All betting and match settlements are handled transparently and securely through a decentralized smart contract deployed on a public blockchain. The project is currently focused on enhancing backend security and infrastructure to ensure a fair and high-performance experience, with plans to add new games and richer betting mechanics.

The Core Stack Backend: Our backend is a high-speed Node.js application. We chose Node.js for its asynchronous, event-driven nature, which is perfectly suited for managing thousands of concurrent connections.

Real-time Communication: For all live gameplay and spectator interactions, we use the lightweight and powerful ws library. This gives us direct, low-level control over the WebSocket protocol, allowing us to broadcast game states and chat messages with minimal latency.

Database & ORM: We use PostgreSQL as our primary database, a robust and reliable choice for storing user data, match histories, and game outcomes. All database interactions are managed through Prisma, a next-generation ORM that provides full type-safety and a clean, declarative API for our backend logic.

Authentication & Social Layer: We use Clerk to handle all authentication and integration with X (formerly Twitter). This was a massive accelerator, allowing us to securely manage user identity and access their social graph (follower lists) without the complexity of building our own OAuth and session management from scratch.

The Trust Layer (Blockchain): All betting and value settlement is handled by a custom Solidity smart contract deployed on the blockchain. This contract acts as a decentralized escrow, holding all wagers and distributing winnings automatically and transparently based on the reported match outcome.