[WIP] Democratic Chess - pays players to play. Critique my tokenomics?

A chess platform that actually pays its players. Pre-TGE. Asking for an honest critique.

Hello bitcointalk,

For years, I played online chess.
The thing that always bothered me: I'd spend hundreds of hours on Lichess and Chess.com, climb the rating, write annotations, lose sleep over bad endgames - and get exactly zero recognition for any of it.
The platforms get the traffic, the ad revenue, and the data.
The player gets a number next to their name.

So I built Democratic Chess.

It's the same chess you know - bullet, blitz, rapid, classical, correspondence, tournaments, Elo-adaptive puzzles, coach tools - with one structural change underneath.
Every meaningful action on the board mints a token to the player's internal balance.
Win a match: tokens. Daily streak: tokens. Tournament prize: tokens. Solve a puzzle streak: tokens.

The token is GAMBIT. ERC-20 on Gnosis Chain.
1B fixed supply.
Tagline I've been using: "mined by your brain, not your electricity."

When a player has earned enough internally, they connect any wallet - MetaMask, Rabby, Coinbase Wallet, anything WalletConnect-compatible - and withdraw GAMBIT to their own address on Gnosis.
The platform pays the gas.
It costs the player nothing.
Once it's in their wallet, it's theirs.
The platform can't freeze it, claw it back, or zero it out.

This isn't theoretical. Where we are right now:

~36,000 registered players
~24,000 games played
~99,000 GAMBIT already withdrawn to user wallets on Gnosis (verifiable on-chain)
10 languages, hand-translated - English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Arabic (RTL), Hindi, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese
500+ chess articles, written by humans, indexed by Google
New features shipping every week or two

Also real: there is no presale, no ICO, no "buy GAMBIT here" button.
Every token that exists in a user's wallet was earned by a human playing chess.
I refused to build a buy flow before there's an honest market.

Now the part where I tell you what I'm not

I'm a software developer. I built the product, ran the infrastructure, integrated the engines, and wrote most of the platform myself.
What I am not is a tokenomics designer, a crypto-legal specialist, or someone who has shipped a token launch before.
I've read the literature, I've designed something I think is reasonable, and I'm fully aware that I don't know what I don't know.

Which is exactly why I'm posting here.
Bitcointalk has people who have watched every kind of token launch succeed, fail, and quietly die for over a decade. I'd be a fool not to ask.

Specific things I would genuinely value feedback on:

1. Emission curve. Earn-only distribution with a 1B fixed cap. I've calibrated per-action rewards by feel and adjusted manually.
I don't trust it past month 12 - inflation vs. user growth math is hard.

2. Pre-TGE communication. ~100k tokens are already in user wallets before any market exists. How do you handle this without making early earners feel cheated or late arrivals feel diluted?

3. Referral mechanics. I run a 5-level commission system with anti-farm gates — no deposit required, no token purchase to participate, referees must actually activate before upline earns, IP dedup, and monthly caps. I think it's defensible. I'd like a stress test from someone who has seen these games go wrong.

4. Listing strategy. Small Gnosis-native project, indie team, modest budget. What's a realistic path? Honest answers preferred over tier-1 CEX fantasy.

5. Unknown unknowns. The things I'm not even worried about because I don't know how to be. Please name them.

If you've done any of this before - launched a token, designed an emission model, fixed a broken referral economy, navigated a TGE for an earn-only project — your two cents will land somewhere useful.

For chess players reading this thread

The platform is free. No wallet needed to sign up. You can play normally and watch the GAMBIT counter tick up; whether you ever withdraw is up to you. Try the democratic team mode — a team of 3 to 7 players debates each move in chat and votes; the majority move plays. It exists nowhere else, and it's surprisingly fun.

What I'm not looking for

Paid "marketing partners." Airdrop shillers. Anyone who wants the "head of growth" title for tokens. I have a product, real users, and a small budget. I'm looking for the kind of feedback a friend gives you before you do something potentially stupid.

Links

Site: democraticchess.com
Tokenomics: democraticchess.com/tokenomics
Whitepaper: democraticchess.com/whitepaper
Contract (Gnosis): 0x15e12eD57ab67c539Fe4e85Db7C7Cd62d404ed99

Disclaimer. This post is informational. Nothing here is an offer to sell a token or security. GAMBIT is a utility and governance token within the platform. Crypto carries substantial risk, including the potential for total loss of value. Restricted jurisdictions, including US residents, will be excluded from any future TGE. Do your own research.

Thanks for reading this far. I'll be in the thread, answering whatever comes — friendly, hostile, technical, or skeptical. Bring it.
Daniel