Most raffles, lotteries and prize draws are not provably fair. They still require a certain amount of trust. If they use a ball machine to generate random numbers, you need to trust that the machine hasn’t been tampered with.If they are using a ‘trusted’ 3^rd party random number generator (RNG), you need to trust that the numbers being generated are truly random.

The problem with traditional prize draws is all the trust required to make them work.By using Bitcoin’s blockchain, we can eliminate the need for trust.

Nobody can predict the hash of a future Bitcoin block, but everyone can verify and agree on it once it has been found. By using this hash to select a winner from our prize draw, we can eliminate the need for trust because everyone can verify the results for themselves.

Don’t Trust, Verify.

‍You can buy tickets and enter the prize draw via the lightning network in 3 easy steps:

‍Step 1 – Enter a Valid Bitcoin Payout Address
‍This should be a main-chain Bitcoin address that you control. If you are the selected winner this is the address that will automatically receive your winning payout. Payouts can only be sent to the address submitted to ensure the draw is provably fair.

‍Step 2 – Choose Your Number of Entries
‍You can choose to buy a single ticket or multiple tickets from the drop-down menu. You will receive a better price per ticket for buying in bulk.

‍Step 3 – Pay Your Lightning Invoice
‍Once you have provided your Bitcoin payout address and selected the number of tickets you want to purchase, you will be shown a QR code to pay for your tickets.

‍Step 4 – Verify Your Entry (Optional)
‍You can verify that we received your entry by entering your paid lightning invoice ID after paying the Lightning invoice.

‍You can enter the prize draw for free by including an OP_RETURN message in an on-chain Bitcoin transaction, You can receive one free entry per valid OP_RETURN message. To enter via OP_RETURN follow these steps:

‍Step 1 – Enter a Valid Bitcoin Payout AddressThis should be a main-chain Bitcoin address that you control. If you are the selected winner this is the address that will receive your winnings. Winnings can only be sent to the address submitted to ensure the draw is provably fair.

‍Step 2 – Receive a Unique Hex Code to Include in OP-RETURNOnce you have entered your Bitcoin payout address you will receive a unique Hex code to include in the OP-RETURN of an on-chain Bitcoin transaction. This unique code can only be used once. Multiple OP_RETURN entries using the same code will not be counted. You will need to request a new HEX code for each free OP_RETURN entry you wish to make.

‍Step 3 – Include your OP-RETURN Code in an on-chain Bitcoin transaction
Send a standard Bitcoin transaction including the unique OP-RETURN code provided. Before selecting a winner, we will scan the blockchain for valid OP_RETURN entries and include them in the draw. OP-RETURN entries will only be considered valid if has three valid confirmations at the end time of the prize draw.

To ensure the draw is provably fair, a winner must be chosen at random in a way that everyone can agree on. To do this we need to generate a random number that nobody can predict, but that everyone can verify. Traditional lotteries and prize draws use a ‘ball machine’ to generate this randomness.

Online lotteries and prize draws might use ‘trusted’ third-party Random Number Generators (RNGs). In either case, you the entrant need to trust that the ball machine has not been tampered with, or that the RNG is truly random.

Both methods still rely on trust. For our prize draw, we use Bitcoin’s public blockchain to help us determine a winner in a provably fair way.

Nobody can predict the hash of a future block on Bitcoin’s blockchain, but everyone can verify and agree on it. That makes it the perfect tool for randomly selecting a winner.‍

Step 1 – After we have collated the entries we will announce the block height of the ‘winning block’. We will use the hash of this Bitcoin block to randomly select a winner.‍

Step 2 – Once the draw is closed, we collate all entries bought via lightning and any free OP_RETURN entries by scanning Bitcoin’s blockchain before sorting them into a list which we then timestamp and publish on both our website and here (link).‍

Step 3 – To select the winner from this published list we take the hash of the predetermined ‘winning block’ and convert it from Hexadecimal, which includes letters and numbers, and looks something like this: 000000000000000000000d29bc798cf3fc99cf31882b2bf5041a3d382984526a

To decimal, which contains only numbers and looks something like this: 4924875017101640245151133000141461571855816484737642‍

Step 4 – We can now use the block hash in decimal form to select our winner from our list of entrants. We divide the block hash by the number of entrants and use the remainder to determine which entry from the list was the winner.

Everything about this prize draw is transparent and verifiable. You don’t need to trust us that the draw is fair, you can verify it for yourself:

‍Proving All Entries Are Legitimate
‍For a prize draw to be provably fair, you need to be able to verify that all entries included in the draw are legitimate. This isn’t a US election, you want to be certain there was no ‘ballot stuffing’.

‍Via Lightning:You can verify that every entry was legitimate because our lightning node is readable. This allows you to verify that every entry made via lightning corresponds to a paid lightning invoice on our node. This prevents us from adding fake unpaid entries to the draw. This is our Node ID: (Insert Lightning Node ID)

‍Via OP_RETURN:
‍In Prize Draws where free entries are available via OP_RETURN you can verify these are legitimate by scanning Bitcoin’s public blockchain.‍

Timestamped Entries:
‍Entries are collated, timestamped and published before a winner is selected. This ensures you can verify that the list the winner was chosen from has not been tampered with.

‍Proving The Winner Was Chosen at Random
‍We publish the results of every prize draw we run. This includes the collated and timestamped list of entrants, and the block height and hash of the ‘winning block’ used to select a winner.To understand how the winner is chosen please click here: (links to ‘selecting a winner’ section above) To view the results of previous prize draws please click here: (link to a place we publish the result of any prize draw we run?)

‍Proving the Winner Was Paid Out The Bitcoin payout address for every entry is published in our timestamped list of entrants. Once the draw has taken place winnings will be paid on-chain to the winning address and we will share the transaction ID to allow you to verify this for yourself. Results of all previous draws will be shared here: (link to a place we publish the result of any prize draw we run?)

All donations made by our Bitcoin Prize Draws are made via Bitcoin. The transaction IDs (TXIDs) of all donations made can be found here: (Insert link to somewhere we display this).