Lottery Rules
A Quintile round is an online raffle that lives entirely on a blockchain. Anyone can buy tickets while the round is open; when it ends, the contract picks winners using public on-chain randomness. About one ticket in five wins. There's no house and no admin who can change the result.
Tickets
Buy tickets during an open round. Each ticket is one entry. More tickets means more entries, not a better payout per winning ticket.
Winners
About one ticket in five wins. Winners split the pool across three tiers, with a small group of grand-prize winners — one to three depending on the size of the round — taking the largest single share. The full breakdown is in Prize Tiers below.
Donations
Donations go to the pot. They do not buy tickets and they do not pay the ticket fee. Donations can make the expected value of tickets positive — when donors cover the 1% fee, every ticket is in expectation worth more than it costs.
Claims
Prizes are not pushed automatically. If a wallet has a winning ticket, the wallet claims the prize after the draw has executed.
Wallet Costs
Gas is separate from the lottery math. Expected value shown in the UI does not include transaction gas.
Permissionless
"Says who?" — says the immutable contract. Anyone with a wallet can buy tickets, donate, request the draw, execute the draw, claim a prize, or read the state. No admin role can stop, censor, or alter any of those actions. The only owner-gated power is sweeping the 1% protocol fee, which is segregated from the pot.
Prize Tiers
When a round is drawn, about one ticket in five wins something. But not every win is equal. The prize pool is split into three legs — Grand, Top, and Second — and which leg a winning ticket lands in decides how much it's worth.
The three legs
Every round divides its pool the same way, no matter how big it is:
- Grand prize — 20% of the pool. A tiny number of winners (one, two, or three depending on round size) split the top fifth of the money. Because so few tickets share so much, a grand-prize ticket is worth far more than any other.
- Top decile — 50% of the pool. The next group, roughly the top 10% of all tickets, splits half the pool evenly between them.
- Second decile — 30% of the pool. The following ~10% of tickets split the last 30%, evenly.
The money is front-loaded: a handful of grand winners take a fifth, the top decile takes half, and the second decile takes the rest. Per ticket, that means Grand >> Top > Second — a grand-prize ticket can be worth dozens of second-decile tickets.
How many winners
The two decile legs always cover about 10% of tickets each — together the ~20% win rate. The grand-prize leg grows in count as the round gets bigger, so a single whale-sized round doesn't hand one wallet an absurd fraction:
| Round size | Grand winners |
|---|---|
| under 100 tickets | 1 |
| 100 – 999 tickets | 2 |
| 1000+ tickets | 3 |
The extra grand winners are drawn from the same top group, so the total number of winners stays right around one in five.
How a ticket lands in a leg
When the draw executes, the contract uses the round's random seed (see No Oracle) to pick winning tickets one at a time into an ordered list. Position in that list is the only thing that sets the tier: the first picks fill the Grand leg, the next batch fills the Top decile, and the batch after that fills the Second decile. Nothing about who holds a ticket affects its odds — every ticket has the same chance of being picked, and the same chance of landing in any leg.
One wallet can hold several winning tickets across different legs. They all settle in a single claim, with the prizes added together.
A worked example
Say a round sells 50 tickets and the pool is Ξ1.25. That's a small round, so there's 1 grand winner, and the deciles are 5 tickets each — 10 winners in all (20% of 50).
• Grand: 20% of Ξ1.25 = Ξ0.25 to that one ticket.
• Top decile: 50% = Ξ0.625, split among 4 → Ξ0.156 each.
• Second decile: 30% = Ξ0.375, split among 5 → Ξ0.075 each.
One Ξ0.005 ticket that hits the grand leg returns Ξ0.25 — a 50× round. The same ticket in the second decile returns Ξ0.075. Both beat the Ξ0.005 cost; the spread between them is the thrill.
Want to feel the spread for any round size and pot? The simulator runs this exact split live and rolls thousands of draws so you can watch the averages settle.
Dust
Splitting a pool into whole units almost never divides perfectly evenly. The tiny remainder left over — the "dust" — isn't kept by anyone. It rolls forward into the next round's pot, so every fraction of value stays in the game.
The fine print
The exact decile counts shift by a ticket or two with round size so the legs always sum cleanly and the grand winners come out of the top group rather than adding to it. The contract computes this deterministically; you don't have to. If you're curious about the precise rule, the simulator shows the counts updating as you drag the ticket slider, and the math section spells it out.