How our draws work
Most competition sites ask you to trust that the draw was fair. This page explains why you do not have to, and — just as importantly — what you would still be trusting us for.
The problem with "we drew it live"
A livestreamed spinner proves that something happened on camera. It does not prove that every entry was in the pool, that the list was not edited beforehand, or that the software behind the animation picked a number honestly. You cannot check any of it afterwards, and if you had doubts there would be nothing to examine.
We do something you can check instead.
Three commitments, in order
We name the randomness in advance
The winner is decided by drand, a public randomness beacon operated by a consortium including Cloudflare, Kudelski, Protocol Labs and several universities. It produces a new signed random number every three seconds, forever, and no single member can control what it produces.
Before a competition opens we publish which exact future number will pick its winner. That number does not exist yet. It cannot be changed afterwards, and if we miss it the competition stops rather than moving to a different one — because a system that can pick a new number after seeing the old one is indistinguishable from one that cheats.
You can see your ticket on the public list
Every confirmed ticket appears on a public entry list as soon as it is issued, searchable by number. Check yours is there before the draw — it is the one thing the cryptography cannot do on your behalf.
Your ticket numbers are not sequential and we do not choose them. They come from a shuffled sequence generated and locked before the competition opened.
The list is fingerprinted and timestamped by someone else
The complete entry list is written to a single file and fingerprinted. That fingerprint is sent to an independent timestamping authority, which signs it — an outside party attesting that this exact list existed at that exact moment.
That happens before the randomness publishes. So the list cannot have been arranged around the winning number, and the winning number cannot have been chosen to suit the list. Neither of us could have steered it.
Then you check it yourself
After the draw, open the verification page for that competition. Your browser fetches the randomness directly from drand's own servers — not from us — re-hashes the entry list, and recomputes the winning ticket. If our published result and your browser's calculation disagree, you will see it turn red.
You can also download the full evidence package and reproduce the result offline, with no access to our systems at all. And every completed draw is written to a public ledger hosted outside our infrastructure, so the records survive us.
Open Draw Engine, the verification tool ↗Free entry is not a lesser entry
There is a genuine free postal route into every competition. A free entry is passed to exactly the same allocator, from exactly the same sequence of ticket numbers, in arrival order. The system records whether an entry was paid or free after the ticket has already been assigned — the allocator has no way to read it, because there is no parameter to pass.
That is a structural guarantee rather than a policy. It is not possible to weight the routes differently without rewriting the allocator.
Instant wins
Where a competition has instant wins, the map of which ticket numbers carry which prizes is generated from randomness that did not exist when we committed to it, then fingerprinted and timestamped before the first ticket is sold. Nobody here can see which tickets win, move a prize onto a different ticket, or hold prizes back.
After the competition closes the secret is revealed, and anyone can regenerate the entire prize map and confirm it matches what was actually awarded.
What you still have to trust us for
Being straight about this is more useful than pretending it does not exist.
- That the entry list is complete. We can prove the list was fixed before the randomness existed. We cannot, by cryptography alone, prove that every entry made it onto it. That is why the entry list is published live while the competition is open — so you can confirm your own ticket is on it before the draw, which is the part we cannot fake.
- That the prize is what we said it is. The draw mechanism says nothing about whether the car exists. That is what company registration, trading history and consumer law are for.
- That the software running is the software described. True of any hosted service. The algorithms are frozen with permanent test vectors and the verifier re-checks them at verification time, but a deployment cannot prove things about itself.
Everything after those three, you can check without asking us for anything.