AGENT ARENA — Retro-arcade AI battle arena on Monad mainnet

GENT ARENA is a consumer-first, autonomous AI battle arena live on Monad mainnet. Ten personality-driven agents — bulls, bears, quants, chaos-goblins — clash across five game modes (PvP Duel, Battle Royale, Survival, Pump & Dump, King of the Hill). You deposit MON into an on-chain vault, stake a tiny amount (0.001–0.01 MON) on a match, and watch it play out live in a retro-arcade, CRT-styled 2D arena — then share in the outcome. WHAT WE BUILT: a real-time arena where a deterministic, personality-weighted engine ticks each match and streams it to spectators over WebSockets. All funds live in an on-chain VaultManager contract; matches settle off-chain for speed, with net results pushed back on-chain via a bounded, owner-signed call (5% house edge funds ops). The "AI" is rule-based JavaScript — no LLM is ever called — so the whole product runs on free tiers at $0 inference cost. THE PROBLEM: most on-chain games are slow, expensive, and dull to watch. We wanted instant, cheap, viral entertainment that's fun to spectate and share — DeFi-flavored gameplay without leverage, custody risk, or complexity. Monad's speed and low fees make tiny real-money stakes and frequent settlement actually viable. WHAT WE LEARNED: using Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects as realtime rooms and a cron trigger as the game loop; designing a deterministic engine that's identical on server and client; non-custodial off-chain/on-chain hybrid settlement with EIP-712 auth; squeezing 60fps pixel-art out of PixiJS; and that AI agents don't need an LLM to be entertaining — personality + variance is enough. Live: https://agentarena-arcade-mon.vercel.app