The Question Nobody Asks Until It Matters
Every online draw asks you to trust that the operator did not pick the winner in advance. Most of the time you have no way to check. The result appears, someone wins, and the only evidence is the operator's word.
That is the problem the StakePoint Weekly Raffle was built to solve. Every draw uses a public randomness beacon that nobody involved in the raffle controls, and the proof for each round is stored so anyone can check it afterwards. This guide explains how the whole thing works, from the SOL you enter with to the moment a square is drawn.
The 5x5 Grid
The raffle runs on a grid of 25 squares. You pick whichever squares you want and decide how much SOL to put on each one. There is no fixed ticket price, so a small entry and a large entry both work.
When the draw runs, one square out of the 25 wins. Everyone who backed that square shares the prize pool, split proportionally to what they put on it. If you staked twice as much as someone else on the winning square, you take twice the share.
Backing more squares increases your chance of hitting the winning one. Backing a single square heavily increases your share if it lands. Both are valid, and the grid makes the trade-off visible rather than hiding it behind ticket bundles.
Where Your SOL Actually Goes
This is the part most raffles are vague about, so here it is precisely.
When you enter, 95% of your SOL immediately buys SPT on the open market through Jupiter. Not from a treasury allocation, not from a reserve. It is a real market buy that goes through the same route any trader would use. The remaining 5% goes to the StakePoint treasury.
The SPT that gets bought is then split two ways. 85% goes into that week's prize pool, which is what the winning square pays out. The other 15% goes into the progressive jackpot, which carries forward between rounds.
There is a consequence worth spelling out. Because every entry converts to a market buy, the raffle generates genuine buy pressure on SPT rather than shuffling tokens between internal balances. The prize you are competing for is bought, not printed.
The Progressive Jackpot
The jackpot is a separate pool that grows every round and does not reset when someone wins the weekly prize. It sits there accumulating 15% of every entry until it triggers.
The odds of it triggering start at roughly 8.3%, or one in twelve. What makes it interesting is that the odds get better as the pool grows. For every 500,000 SPT that accumulates, the denominator drops by one. So one in twelve becomes one in eleven, then one in ten, and so on. The floor is one in two.
That means a jackpot that goes unclaimed for a long stretch becomes both larger and significantly more likely to land. It cannot grow indefinitely without becoming close to a coin flip. When it does trigger, the winner takes the entire accumulated jackpot.
What Happens on an Empty Square
Not every square gets backed every round. If the draw lands on a square nobody picked, the round has no winner, and 95% of that week's prize pool rolls into the jackpot instead.
This is why the jackpot can grow faster than the 15% base rate suggests. Quiet weeks with sparse grids feed it directly. It also means the empty square outcome is not a dead round. The value stays in the system and raises the stakes for everyone in the following weeks.
The Staker Bonus
If you stake SPT on StakePoint, your raffle entries carry 25% extra weight.
Worth being precise about what that means, because it is often described loosely elsewhere. It is not a discount. You do not pay less per square. Your entry counts for more when the prize is divided, so on a winning square a staker takes a larger share than a non-staker who put in the same amount of SOL.
It exists because the people who lock their SPT into pools carry more of the platform's long-term risk, and the raffle should reflect that.
How the Draw Is Actually Made Random
Here is the part that matters most.
The winning square is not chosen by a StakePoint server, a database function, or anything else that StakePoint operates. It comes from drand, a distributed randomness beacon run by a network of independent organisations. Drand produces a new publicly verifiable random value at fixed intervals, and no single participant in the network can predict or influence the output.
Drand is not something built for this raffle. It is infrastructure used across the wider decentralised ecosystem, including by Filecoin, precisely because its output can be checked by anyone without trusting the party using it.
For every raffle round, the beacon signature used for that draw is stored. That gives you two things. You can confirm the value came from drand rather than from us, and you can confirm that the value maps to the square that actually won. Neither check requires you to take anything on faith, and neither requires our cooperation.
This is what "provably fair" should mean. Not a claim in the marketing copy, but a value you can independently look up and verify against a result that was published before you checked.
Why This Design Over the Alternatives
There are simpler ways to run a draw. A server picking a random number is easier to build. A hash of a future block is a common approach and needs no external dependency.
Both have the same weakness: the party running the draw is also the party producing or selecting the randomness. Even when operated honestly, there is no way for a participant to distinguish an honest operator from a dishonest one. The proof is missing regardless of intent.
Using an external beacon removes StakePoint from that position entirely. We cannot influence the outcome, which means you do not have to work out whether we would.
Entering
The raffle runs weekly, with the draw at midnight on Monday. Connect a wallet on the raffle page, pick your squares, set your SOL amount per square, and confirm. Entries are open until the draw.
Everything settles automatically. Winners receive SPT directly, and the next round opens with whatever the jackpot has carried forward.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can StakePoint influence which square wins?
No. The winning square derives from a drand beacon value produced by a network StakePoint has no part in. The signature for every round is stored so the result can be checked independently.
What happens if nobody picks the winning square?
The round pays out nothing and 95% of the prize pool moves into the progressive jackpot for future rounds.
Do I need to hold SPT to enter?
No. You enter with SOL and anyone can play. Holding and staking SPT gives your entries 25% extra weight, but it is not a requirement.
Is there a minimum entry?
You set your own SOL amount per square, so entries scale to what you are comfortable with rather than a fixed ticket price.
How is the jackpot different from the weekly prize?
The weekly prize pool pays out to the winning square each round. The jackpot accumulates across rounds and triggers on its own odds, which improve as it grows, starting near one in twelve and floored at one in two.
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