docs

holoholona is a on-chain lottery and gaming platform built on Solana. ticket purchases, pool accumulation, winner selection and prize distribution all happen in an open-source program.

there are admin keys, and pretending otherwise would be the wrong kind of reassurance. four separate keys exist, and what each can do is written down in the repository's docs/KEYS.md. the short version: the key that triggers draws is the only one that runs on a server, and it can trigger a draw without being able to choose one. the key that can pause a game or open a round is kept offline, and it cannot take a pot — prizes only ever pay the wallet recorded on the winning ticket.

players connect a Solana wallet (Phantom or Solflare — Backpack is in the design and not yet wired up), purchase tickets in SOL, and wait for the scheduled draw. winners are determined by a Verifiable Random Function (VRF) — a value committed before ticket sales close, so the outcome could not have been known when it was chosen.

1. player purchases ticket — SOL is sent to the game's on-chain pool account
2. draw triggers at scheduled time or pool threshold
3. VRF oracle (Switchboard) generates a verifiable random seed on-chain
4. smart contract selects winner(s) deterministically from seed
5. the winning ticket claims its prize — payouts are pull, not push. the design says "distributed automatically, no claim needed"; the program does not work that way, because pushing to fourteen winners in one transaction fails entirely if any one of them cannot receive
6. if nobody claims within the claim window, anyone may return the money to the people who bought the tickets — so an unclaimed prize is never lost, only delayed
7. the round account keeps the seed it was drawn with and the winning ticket indices, so the result can be recomputed from chain. it does not store a proof or a signature, and the site does not yet index draw history — see the FAQ

holoholona uses Switchboard VRF — Solana's decentralized oracle network for verifiable randomness. each draw produces:

• VRF seed — the random value produced by the oracle network. the round account keeps it, so the draw can be recomputed
• the commitment — the round records which randomness account will decide it, and the slot sales closed in, before that account holds any value. the program then refuses any account seeded earlier than the close. this is what makes the outcome unchooseable, more than the randomness itself
• the winning indices — which tickets the seed selected. this list, plus the seed, is the whole record

this list used to include a stored proof and a stored transaction signature. neither is on the round account, and saying they were made the fairness claim sound more verifiable than it is.

a draw is verifiable in principle and not yet from this site. the round account stores the seed it was drawn with and the winning ticket indices, and the selection is a pure function of those two things, so anyone reading the account can recompute the result. what does not exist is an index of draw history — so there is no verify link on the draws page. the links that used to be there pointed at transaction signatures that had never existed, and were removed rather than left looking plausible.