🪙 StakeMate: Turning Accountability Into Action

🌱 Inspiration

Our team wanted to tackle one of the biggest challenges students face: procrastination. Many productivity apps fail because users can easily ignore reminders. We were inspired by the idea of introducing small stakes to make accountability more meaningful.

StakeMate helps students follow through on their goals by adding real, but limited, stakes. The goal is not to encourage betting habits, but to build better ones. That’s why the maximum stake is "$20", and **30% of all winnings are taxed. The vision for this tax is to donate it forward to charities that support students like us.

💡 What It Does

StakeMate lets students create or join lobbies around specific tasks, such as writing essays, finishing readings, or completing LeetCode problems.

Each participant pledges up to $20.
If they finish their task on time, they earn back their stake and a share of the pot.
If they don’t, their stake is split; 70% to the winners, 30% to student charities.

For the MVP, we don’t use real money yet. All transactions are simulated with points to represent the stakes and rewards. This allows us to test user behavior and refine the system safely before adding real payment integrations.

🛠 How We Built It

We built StakeMate using Next.js and React for the frontend and Node.js, Express, and Supabase for the backend. Authentication is handled with Auth0, which verifies .edu email addresses.

For AI-based task verification, we’re integrating Google Gemini and NeuralSeek to fairly assess submissions like essays or coding tasks.

⚙️ Challenges We Faced

The hardest part was balancing motivation with responsibility. We wanted the app to be effective without promoting gambling behavior. Setting the $20 cap, using points in the MVP, and adding the 30% charity rule helped align the platform with our mission.

We also faced technical challenges syncing authentication, managing lobby data, and designing a fair AI verification workflow.

🧠 What We Learned

We learned how behavioral psychology can be applied responsibly through technology. On the technical side, we strengthened our skills in full-stack development, authentication, and AI integration. Most importantly, we learned how to design an app that encourages productivity while supporting a positive social impact.