In Brief:
- Anichess (official site) is moving M8, its onchain points layer, back to Base and has given players until Sept. 7 at 23:59 UTC to opt in.
- The opt-in is a migration banner inside the game: tick a box, hit save. Anichess said it takes under a minute.
- M8 accrual moved to Abstract when $CHECK launched in November 2025, splitting points and staking away from the chain that held the token’s liquidity.
Anichess has given players until Sept. 7 at 23:59 UTC to opt in to moving their M8 points to Base.
The step is handled inside the game. “Open the migration banner in-game, tick the box, hit Save changes. That’s the whole job,” Anichess said in a post announcing the deadline. The opt-in also sits on the Anichess homepage and takes less than a minute, according to the studio.
Migrate your M8 to Base.
Open the migration banner in-game, tick the box, hit Save changes. That's the whole job.
Deadline: September 7th 23:59 UTC
Anichess framed the points move as the first piece of a wider return, posting “Back to @base we go, mates.” It hasn’t said which other parts of the ecosystem follow, or when.
What is actually moving
M8 is the game’s onchain points layer. It isn’t a token and can’t be bought. Players earn it by finishing 15 Standard matches in a week, with the payout scaled to rating class, or by staking $CHECK.
Claims open at 08:00 UTC. Unclaimed M8 accumulates, and weekend claims can arrive late but stay valid for a 24-hour stretch.
Spending M8 buys a seat in Checkmate Arena, which draws 50 players at random each week and pays every one of them at least 500 $CHECK. That makes the points the entry ticket to the competitive layer rather than a cosmetic score.
The split this reverses
M8 launched on Base in April 2025. Points banked during Season 3, the public alpha tied to the Yield Guild Games distribution deal, were converted into M8 automatically with no manual step.
The chains diverged with the token. $CHECK became the native token on Nov. 13, 2025, closing a phased rollout that began Nov. 12. Staking, claims, M8 accrual and the early $CHECK mechanics all landed on Abstract.
But Base kept liquidity and trading through Aerodrome Finance. Players who wanted to trade or supply liquidity had to bridge from Abstract to Base to do it. The Ethernals NFT collection stayed on Ethereum through all of it.
Abstract also hosted the Pudgy Takeover, billed as the first large Anichess event on that network. It ran a PenguBoard mode and a PenguBlast spell, put up to 600,000 $PENGU PENGU $0.007536 ▲ +6.1% on the table and restricted tournament entry to players logged in through Abstract Global Wallet.
Where the game stands
Season 8, “Overpowered,” arrived in April 2026 with a spell rebalance that buffed every spell in the game and wiped both the Gambit and Standard ladders. The season carries 700,000 $CHECK in total, including a 600,000 $CHECK Gambit prize pool.
$CHECK is capped at 1 billion supply, with 59.38% earmarked for ecosystem growth and player rewards. Utility covers tournament entry, staking that generates M8, in-game purchases and governance through Checkmate Improvement Proposals. The token debuted on Coinbase on April 2, 2026.
Anichess is an Animoca Brands (official site) subsidiary and operates in partnership with Chess.com. A casual survival game, King’s Gambit, is expected in the fourth quarter of 2026 and is meant to widen what $CHECK is used for.
For now the studio is asking for one checkbox. Players who don’t tick it before Sept. 7 have not been told what happens to their points.
