How it works

Draw enters countdown

When a draw reaches its published capacity trigger, it enters a 48-hour finalization window. At this point we lock in a specific future drand beacon round — one that hasn't been published yet. We record this round number publicly on the competition.

Pool is closed & hashed

At the end of the countdown, entries are closed. All entry IDs are sorted alphabetically and hashed (SHA-256) to create an immutable pool fingerprint. Anyone with the entry list can reproduce this hash.

drand publishes the committed round

The pre-committed beacon round is now live on the public drand network. You can verify it yourself:curl https://drand.cloudflare.com/public/{round}The response contains a randomness value and a BLS threshold signature proving it was generated honestly by the distributed network.

Winner derived deterministically

The winning entry index is calculated with a single formula:winner_index = BigInt(randomness_hex) mod pool_sizeThe entry at that position in the sorted pool is the winner. Anyone can repeat this calculation — no trust in AlphaDraw required.

Public proof published

The full proof — pool hash, drand round, randomness, BLS signature, and derivation — is published on the draw's verify page. Anyone can independently confirm the result using only public data.