How competition draws work

Every normal competition uses commit–reveal randomness. You can verify fairness yourself after entries close — no trust required.

Step by step

1. Seed commit — before the draw, we generate a secret seed and publish only its SHA-256 hash.
2. Entries close — ticket purchases stop at the competition close time.
3. Seed reveal — at draw time the original seed is published.
4. Winning ticket(s) — we hash the revealed seed and map it to ticket number(s) between 1 and total tickets sold.
5. Winners — the holder of each winning ticket number wins the prize for that rank.

Tickets are numbered 1 … N in the order they are sold. The draw only picks which position wins — it does not reshuffle who owns which number.

The formula

random seed  →  SHA-256  →  H (64 hex characters, public)
                            ↓
                  treat H as huge integer R
                            ↓
               winning ticket = (R % N) + 1

For multiple prize ranks we run a deterministic shuffle from the same seed so each rank gets a unique winning ticket.

What you can verify

• The seed hash was published before the draw.
• The revealed seed matches SHA-256(revealed) === H.
• The winning ticket calculation matches the formula above.
• The winner corresponds to the ticket ownership record.

Example — 10 tickets

If N = 10 and the hash interprets to integer 94231:

(94231 % 10) + 1 = 2 → ticket #2 wins.

On each competition page you will see the commitment log (seed hash and, after draw, revealed seed and winning ticket numbers).