Communities have used lotteries to raise funds for their treasuries, public goods, and/or specific causes (charity) for multiple centuries - even millennia - all around the world. Legend has it that the Great Wall of China was funded that way. Augustus Ceasar used them to repair the city of Rome. Aside from the popular (but monopolised) “national lotteries”, many cultures in different continents have similar micro-scale methods to fund clubs and public goods. Some examples are Lotería Familiar (Dominican Republic), Arisan (Indonesia), Chit Fund (India), Esusu (Nigeria), Tontine (France), El Gordo (Spain), etc... However, these lotteries can be rigged and nontransparent, which breaks the community's trust and collaborative efforts.

Overall, lotteries have been a very interesting coordination mechanism to form capital for public goods funding. Their major flaws (transparency, fairness, optionality) can be solved by building a permissionless protocol on Ethereum that allows anybody to create their own lotteries. To achieve this, we are using our novel EVM-optimised cryptographic shuffling tech that we have used at Fairy, which enables gas-efficient, fair & fully onchain lotteries and raffles. Additionally, our team is also developing next-gen verifiable sources of randomness for networks that don’t yet have one.

This project aims to add another fundraising mechanism to the PGF toolbox that anybody can use to incentivise people to donate to their preferred project. For this, we are creating a factory that makes it as easy and customisable as possible for organisers to create a fundraising lottery with the following customisable parameters: The ticket price, the split between the prize pool and contribution pool per ticket, the prize draw date, and time OR interval (if rolling lottery), percentage to roll over in case of jackpot win (if rolling lottery), and the chances of winning (range of numbers to be picked).

Once deployed, the player/donor can buy lottery tickets from an easy-to-use interface to support their preferred network state, event, community, or cause.