A provably fair draw

Every entry goes into one big list and gets its own number, in order. Paid or free, every entry sits in the same list with exactly the same chance. Buy several entries and you get a block of numbers, simple to count and simple to check. Your number is just a label so you can find yourself in the list. Where it sits makes no difference to your chance of winning.

Each draw closes before the winners are drawn, with a clear deadline for both online and free postal entries. Free postal entries must say which draw they are for and must reach us by the deadline for that draw. An entry that doesn't name its draw, or arrives too late, can't be included. Please post in good time, it's the arrival that counts, not the postmark.

Once the deadline has passed, we bring every valid entry into one single list, online and postal together, each with exactly the same chance.

The size of the prizes, and how many winners there are, grows with the size of the draw. We publish exactly how that's worked out in advance. When entries close and the final prize pot is known, we apply that same published method to set the tiers, the number of winners and every prize amount, and we lock them in before the draw runs.

Before the draw, we take the complete list and run it through SHA-256, a well-established cryptographic method, the same kind of technology used to secure websites and protect data. It turns the whole list into a single short code called a fingerprint.

This fingerprint is unique to that exact list, in that exact order. Change even one entry, add one, remove one, or reorder them, and the fingerprint comes out completely different. It only works one way: you can produce the fingerprint from the list, but you can't work backwards from it to alter the list.

We publish that fingerprint, together with the locked prize breakdown, before the draw and before the random number even exists. Once it's public, we're locked in. We can't quietly add an entry, remove someone, swap the list, or change the prizes, because the fingerprint would no longer match and anyone checking would catch us instantly.

Now we need a random number to drive the draw, and this is what makes it genuinely fair. We don't make that number ourselves. If we did, you'd just have to trust us again.

Instead we use drand, a public randomness beacon run by the League of Entropy, a group of independent universities, companies and non-profit organisations around the world. Together they produce a fresh random value on a fixed schedule, out in the open, for anyone to use. We have no affiliation with them and no influence over the number. We can't predict it, we can't change it, and we can't run it, and neither can anyone else. That's the whole point of how it's built: no single party is in control.

We announce exactly which value we'll use before it exists. Because nobody can predict it, we can't sit and wait for a result we like. We're committed to whatever the world rolls.

The random value from drand is then used to shuffle the sealed list. Picture shuffling a deck of cards, except every single move of the shuffle is decided by that public value, not by us. The winners are simply whoever ends up in the top spots, the first drawn takes the top prize, the next fill the tier below, and so on down.

Because the random value decides the entire shuffle, where you started in the list makes no difference. Buying early, buying late, a low number or a high one, none of it changes anything. Everyone is shuffled by the same outside force.

After the draw we publish everything: the full list of entries, the fingerprint, the prize breakdown, the exact drand value we used, and the recipe that turns them into the result. Feed those same ingredients into our open verification tool, or your own, and you'll get the very same winners we did. Every single time, because the process is fixed and repeatable.

You don't have to trust us. You can check us, and so can journalists, regulators, and the winners themselves.