The SHFL Lottery: The Internet's Lotto
Last updated
Last updated
The SHFL Lottery was a massive change to the SHFL token model. We brought crypto users onto the best platform in the industry to stake in the lotto. We introduced staking to a whole new crowd of wagerers. Since then, SHFL has seen over 100 million SHFL staked in the lottery — the largest TVL crypto lottery to date. This update to the SHFL Lottery begins a new era, with the goal of becoming the internet’s lottery.
This update will create an entirely new growth for the Lottery prizepool as we open up single tickets to our entire userbase, while keeping SHFL staking free and the best way to play the lottery. Single tickets will allow users to play in any deposit asset on Shuffle. Each ticket sold will add to the prize pool, spurring the parabolic growth seen in traditional lottery products.
Lotteries are the most socially acceptable form of wagering in the world. Lotteries are fun, exciting and are ripe for innovation. With this update, the SHFL Lottery keeps building on its lead of being becoming the best lottery in crypto.
Dynamic Real Time Prize Pool: The prize pool will be dynamic and live, meaning that the rewards grow in real time as users buy tickets.
Single tickets: Purchase tickets in any deposit currency. These tickets last one draw.
Powerplay tickets: Increase your odds by buying a Powerplay ticket. These tickets last one draw. Users are "buying" the powerball number and will only select 5 numbers for a chance to win rather than 5 + 1 Powerball.
Sharable tickets: So everyone in chat can see your lucky numbers and biggest wins.
Simplified Staking: Staking is heavily simplified and moved to the token dashboard.
The impact of this is twofold. SHFL becomes massively more attractive in terms of utility as the prize pool for the lottery is accelerated by single ticket purchases. Additionally, we grow the lottery from the 10% of our user base who plays and stakes in SHFL to the entire platform. The same player base that wagers more than 2 billion USD each month now can purchase tickets for the best lottery in crypto.
The SHFL Lottery has not seen the growth in prize pool size typical with traditional lotteries, lacking the excitement Powerball and Mega Millions. Traditional lotteries go through a period of parabolic growth as prize pools break out of their usual size, which the SHFL Lottery has not yet experienced. With this update to the lottery, we expect to see a massive shift in how the lottery growth is experienced as showcased below.
An unexplored aspect of the lottery with the introduction of single tickets is how single tickets players will “play” the lottery. Most of the sales for the lottery, just like staking and unstaking, will happen within the last day before the lottery draws. This creates a scenario where the true prize pool of the lotto is unknown until the final second, creating an environment where players and stakers don’t know how much can be won that week up until the final moments.
The SHFL Lottery will have a live, dynamic prize pool that updates in real time. Every sale of a single ticket will update in real time, allowing users to feel the excitement as the draw counts down.
SHFL staking is being heavily simplified. We are removing the functionality to select your numbers for staked tickets, and keeping that feature for single ticket purchasers only. Your tickets that have been previously selected will not be changed. The ability to cancel an unstake has been removed. In the future, you will be able to instantly unstake your SHFL and we think this is a healthy medium for staking and removing the complexity of pending unstakes. All your activity for SHFL Lottery will be moved to the token dashboard so you can easily manage everything to do with your SHFL tokens.
Standard tickets can be purchased with any currency on the platform except SHFL, which can only be staked. Additionally users will have the option of purchasing Powerplay tickets, which cost more, but will allow you to buy the powerball. This option increases your odds of winning the Jackpot by 18x. Both standard tickets and Powerplay tickets only last one draw, and are not perpetual like SHFL staking.
All future updates to the SHFL Lottery, including changes to the odds, number of balls, and number range will be reflected prior to the upcoming draw and will be recorded in Lottery History.
The lottery is a unique opportunity for SHFL as its a completely underserved market in both the online gaming market and crypto. Crypto has approached lottery products and seen them as a way to incentivize saving, such as lossless lotteries like pooltogether. Gaming operators have seen it differently. To them, lotteries are secondary products, with underwhelming prize pools that are not fun to play or win. We believe the SHFL Lottery is a massive improvement on both. As we iterate on the SHFL Lottery with this release, we want to bring the excitement of the SHFL Lottery onchain to onboard the next generation of users.
The SHFL Foundation wants to bring the SHFL Lottery onchain. A reoccurring sentiment with crypto native users since the launch of the SHFL Lottery has been:
“I want to buy and stake SHFL to enter the lottery, but I want to hold my own keys.”
“I want to use SHFL in decentralized finance, just like the rest of my portfolio.”
“Why haven’t you brought this onchain?”
We’re exploring taking the SHFL Lottery onchain. We firmly believe a core part of the crypto market that is underserved are lotteries. Pooltogether has led the way in this regard, taking the innovations of DeFi 2.0 and creating a consumer savings product. The onchain SHFL Lottery will be a consumer product that takes the best learnings from centralized offerings and brings it to a whole new class of SHFL stakers and ticket buyers. More details of the onchain SHFL Lottery will come at a future date.
