Technical deep-dives on poker software, provably fair systems, blockchain security, and building better card games.
A one-week build log across the UI, Poker Virtual Machine and chain — 10 merged pull requests after a five-day halt: a rebuilt peer topology, a self-service validator portal that refuses dangerous bonds, and an unauthenticated bridge endpoint closed.
Build Log Validators InfrastructureA four-day build log across the UI, Poker Virtual Machine and chain — 63 merged pull requests, three coordinated halts that put the Go engine on mainnet, a showdown deadlock found by players rather than tests, and the end of the account-sequence race.
Build Log Engine ReleasesA one-week build log across the UI, Poker Virtual Machine, and chain — 7 merged pull requests spent on a clockwise showdown where the beaten hand can muck, a deterministic action clock built as a permissionless timeout action, and the groundwork for dealing hole cards one at a time.
Build Log Engine ShowdownA one-week build log across the UI, Poker Virtual Machine and chain — 18 merged pull requests and 2,270 lines spent on what happens when a player joins a table, plus nine chain releases, six embedded Go engine bumps, and a per-seat action echo that lasted 28 hours.
Build Log UI Release EngineeringA three-week build log across the UI, Poker Virtual Machine, and chain — 102 merged pull requests spent on a one-to-one Go port of the poker engine proven byte-for-byte against TypeScript over ~2,000 hands, a chain-authoritative VRF deck, and an optimistic mempool oracle.
Build Log Go EngineA full-year engineering retrospective across the UI, Poker Virtual Machine, and Cosmos chain — plus the indexer that keeps the receipts, the funding rails, the randomness bugs that halted the chain twice, and the 13,837 hands dealt and audited on verifiable randomness.
Build Log RetrospectiveAn engineering build log of the first half of 2026 across our three codebases — open-sourcing the client, migrating to Ethereum mainnet, VRF-backed provably fair shuffling, real-money tournaments, and a WebSocket-first optimistic gateway.
Build Log ArchitectureA technical breakdown of the Fisher-Yates shuffle, commitment schemes, and why most online poker platforms can't prove their games are fair — but ours can.
Cryptography FairnessThe most common ways online poker games can be manipulated, and the cryptographic techniques that make manipulation mathematically impossible.
Security TrustFrom real-time multiplayer to zero-knowledge proofs — a behind-the-scenes look at the architecture decisions that make or break an online poker platform.
Architecture BlockchainHow ZKPs allow players to verify game fairness without revealing hidden information. Mental poker protocols, commitment schemes, and why most platforms don't bother.
ZKP Mental Poker Research