Check the draw yourself.
You should not have to take our word for who won. Every SFLK draw is built so a stranger with no access to anything of ours can recompute the winner and get the same answer — or catch us if they don’t.
How it works
We lock in a secret before entries close
We generate a random server seed and publish its SHA-256 hash while the edition is still open. The hash gives nothing away, but it pins the seed: once published we cannot change it without the hash failing to match. This is the step that stops us picking a seed after seeing who entered.
The randomness comes from somewhere we don't control
After entries close we take a value from a public randomness beacon — a source that publishes unpredictable numbers on a fixed schedule, to everyone, at the same time. We could not have known it in advance and cannot influence it. Our seed alone would leave you trusting us; the beacon alone would let anyone who saw it early game the timing. Both together mean neither side can steer the result.
Every entry is one ticket, laid end to end
Entrants are sorted by reference and each takes as many consecutive tickets as they hold entries. Holding twice as many entries means occupying twice as much of the line — no weighting, no adjustment, no discretion. We publish a hash of the exact entrant list so nobody can claim a different set was in the pool.
The winning ticket is drawn without bias
We hash the seed, the entrant list and the beacon together, and read a number from it. Taking that number modulo the entry count would very slightly favour low-numbered tickets, so instead any value above the largest exact multiple of the total is discarded and we hash again with the counter incremented. The number of rounds it took is published too, so the recomputation is exact rather than 'trust our loop'.
Then we hand you everything
The seed, the commitment, the beacon and its source, the entrant list, the ticket, the round count. Enough to reproduce the result from scratch — and enough to prove us wrong if it doesn't reproduce.
Published proofs
No edition has closed, so there is no real proof to publish yet. When one does, its full proof appears here and on the winners page, permanently.
EXAMPLE ONLY — NOT A REAL DRAW.Nobody below is a real entrant and nothing here awarded anything. These numbers are produced by the same code that will run the real draw, over three made-up entrants, so you can check the method described above actually matches what the software does — today, before any edition has closed.
A worked example you can recompute
Three entrants holding 210, 175 and 320 entries — 705 tickets in total. Sorted by published handle, they occupy these ranges:
- SERVER SEED (revealed after the draw)
- sflk-example-seed-do-not-use-for-a-real-draw
- SEED COMMITMENT — SHA-256 OF THE SEED, PUBLISHED BEFORE CLOSE
- 998a8b14e5f1f3b0d30d7764ed93ce8f8492ff39a584fa3d1db54829a9e91c5d
- COMMITTED AT
- 2026-08-10T00:00:00.000Z
- BEACON
- 0e1f6bdf2a9c2f3f4d5b6a7c8d9e0f1a2b3c4d5e6f708192a3b4c5d6e7f80912
- BEACON SOURCE
- drand round 4210000 (example value)
- ENTRANTS ROOT — SHA-256 OF THE LIST ABOVE
- e590fbc1d84243258cebf6611b5de58a9eb5c118f014b5e103aeb11f0e7e2fb7
- TOTAL ENTRIES
- 705
- REJECTION-SAMPLING ROUNDS
- 1
- WINNING TICKET
- 111
- WINNER (published handle)
- 528dbb352d3727ed
To check it: hash serverSeed|entrantsRoot|beacon|round with SHA-256, starting at round 0. Read the first 13 hex characters as a number. If it is at or above the largest multiple of 705 below 252, increment the round and hash again. Otherwise take it modulo 705— that is ticket 111, which falls in 528dbb352d3727ed’s range.
SELF-CHECK: PASS.This page ran SFLK’s own verifier against the example above when it rendered — seed against commitment, entrant list against its hash, and the winner recomputed from scratch. All of it reproduced.
What this does not cover
This proves the draw was fair given the entrant list. It does not, on its own, prove the entrant list is complete — that rests on the entry ledger, which is append-only and records every credit and void with the reason it happened. The Official Rules set out who is eligible and how a winner is contacted, and free mail-in entry is always open.