How It Works

LightChallenge follows a four-stage lifecycle: Create → Prove → Verify → Settle.

1. Create a Challenge

A user creates a challenge by calling createChallenge() on the ChallengePay smart contract, specifying:

Goal — What they’re committing to (e.g., “10,000 steps per day for 7 days”)
Stake — LCAI tokens locked in the contract
Deadline — When the challenge expires
Template — Which verification model to use (fitness-steps, gaming-dota2, etc.)

The stake is held in escrow by the smart contract until the challenge is finalized.

2. Submit Evidence

When the user has completed their goal, they submit evidence through the webapp:

Fitness challenges — Connect Apple Health, Strava, Garmin, or Fitbit. The iOS collector app reads HealthKit data and submits it.
Gaming challenges — Link Steam, Riot, or FACEIT accounts. The system pulls match data from gaming APIs.
Custom challenges — Upload evidence manually.

Evidence is stored in the database with a cryptographic hash for integrity.

3. AI Verification

The evidence goes through a multi-stage verification pipeline:

Evidence Evaluator — An off-chain worker evaluates the evidence against the challenge rules and produces a verdict (pass/fail with reasons)
Challenge Dispatcher — Queues approved verdicts as AIVM jobs
Challenge Worker — Submits an inference request to the Lightchain AIVM network
Lightchain Network — Native AIVM workers commit, reveal, and attest to the result via Proof-of-Intelligence (PoI) consensus
AIVM Indexer — Watches for InferenceFinalized events and bridges the result back to ChallengePay

4. Settlement

Once the AIVM network finalizes the verification:

Pass → The challenge is finalized as successful. The user can claim their stake back plus any rewards.
Fail → The challenge is finalized as failed. The stake goes to the protocol treasury.
Expired → If no proof is submitted before the deadline, the challenge can be finalized as expired.

Claims are pull-based — users call claimWinner() or claimRefund() on the smart contract to withdraw.

Architecture Diagram

User → Webapp → Evidence DB → Evaluator → Verdict
                                              ↓
                                         Dispatcher → AIVM Job
                                              ↓
                                      Challenge Worker → Lightchain AIVM
                                              ↓
                                     (Commit → Reveal → PoI Attest)
                                              ↓
                                      InferenceFinalized event
                                              ↓
                                       AIVM Indexer → ChallengePay.finalize()
                                              ↓
                                         User claims reward

Challenge Types

Binary Challenges

Simple pass/fail outcomes. Example: “Walk 10,000 steps today.”

Competitive Challenges (via EventChallengeRouter)

Multiple participants compete. The router manages multi-outcome resolution, ranking participants by their verified results.

Event Challenges

Tied to real-world events (matches, races). The EventChallengeRouter resolves outcomes based on external event results.

Protocol Architecture