The mechanism, end to end

How it works

Hold $POW, win the hour. This page walks through the entire mechanism, end to end, with nothing hidden.

The draw, hour by hour
  1. Hold 100,000 $POW and you are in

    Every full 100,000 $POW in your wallet counts as one entry, rounded down. There are no tickets to buy, nothing to stake, nothing to claim. Your balance is your position, and it updates the moment you trade.

  2. At the top of the hour, a snapshot

    Every eligible holder is recorded from the public block explorer. Liquidity pools, lockers, the treasury, and every project wallet are excluded from the snapshot. The house cannot hold entries and the house cannot win.

  3. Randomness nobody controls

    The winning entries are selected using drand, a public randomness beacon operated by an independent consortium including Cloudflare, EPFL, and Kudelski Security. The beacon publishes a new random value every few seconds, and the draw uses the round fixed by the draw's scheduled time. A favorable outcome cannot be shopped for, by us or by anyone.

  4. Two winners are paid automatically

    Each hour draws two separate wallets, with no claiming from either. The fee winner receives 50% of the trading fees collected during that hour, paid in ETH. The ticket winner receives a free lottery ticket, 100,000 $POW, released that day from the locked dev supply. If you win while you sleep, you find out when you wake up.

  5. Everything is published

    Each draw publishes its complete holder snapshot, the randomness round it used, and both payout transactions. The full history lives on the $POW tokenomics page and on chain.

The two prizes, and where the money comes from
Winner one · the fee share
50% of the hour's fees

Every buy pays a 2% fee and every sell pays a 4% fee. The fees stream in ETH into the Powerhood Vault — a smart contract that splits every payment in half the moment it arrives. At the top of each hour the contract pays the fee winner directly out of its own pot. We cannot withdraw that pot or send it anywhere else. There is no floor and no cap: a quiet hour pays a little, a busy hour pays a lot.

Winner two · the free ticket
100,000 $POW

Just over half the total $POW supply — 504,000,000, or 50.4% — sits time-locked in the dev wallet. It unlocks on a weekly schedule, 16,800,000 $POW a week, and is handed out as one ticket of 100,000 $POW per hour, 24 hours a day. At that rate the entire 504,000,000 $POW allocation is given back to holders over 210 days, and the dev wallet ends empty.

The other 50% of the fees. The half that is not paid out goes to the team treasury wallet. It funds marketing, listings, and continued development of the protocol. The treasury address is published on the $POW tokenomics page, so every payment out of it is visible on chain as it happens.
Verify any draw yourself

You do not have to trust us that a draw was fair. Every draw can be recomputed from public data in three steps:

  1. Open the draw's snapshot

    It lists every eligible wallet, its balance, and its entries at draw time, plus the drand round number the draw was bound to.

  2. Fetch the randomness

    Ask the drand network for that round's value at api.drand.sh. It is signed by the consortium and cannot be altered after the fact, by anyone.

  3. Recompute both winners

    Sort the snapshot by address, take the randomness modulo the total entries, and walk the list until you reach that entry. The wallet you land on is the fee winner. The ticket winner comes from the same beacon value, hashed once more, and walked the same way. If either ever differed from the announced winner, the proof of cheating would be public and permanent.

Why this matters. Most "lottery" tokens ask you to trust an operator picking winners in private. Here, cheating is not just forbidden, it is detectable by anyone with a laptop within minutes.
What cannot be gamed

Splitting your bag loses entries

Each wallet rounds down separately. 500,000 $POW in one wallet is five entries. The same tokens across six wallets can only be five entries or fewer, never more. Fragmenting a balance is strictly worse.

The house is out of the pool

Liquidity pools, lockers, the locked dev supply, the treasury, and every team wallet are excluded from each snapshot. The exclusion list is public. Prize money flows one way: outward.

Randomness is fixed by the clock

The drand round is a pure function of the draw's scheduled time. There is no way to wait for a convenient random number, rerun a draw, or choose when to sample. The clock decides, then the math decides.

Hopping in and out costs more than it earns

Entries are real the moment you hold, but a round trip pays 2% going in and 4% coming out. Darting in before the hour and out after is a strategy that reliably loses to simply holding, and it pays the winners on the way past.

Common questions
  1. When are the draws?

    Every hour, on the hour, around the clock. Two winners an hour, 48 a day, 336 a week.

  2. What do I need to do to enter?

    Nothing. Hold at least 100,000 $POW in a normal wallet and you are automatically in every draw, indefinitely.

  3. Can one wallet win both prizes in the same hour?

    Yes, if the beacon lands there twice. Both draws run over the same snapshot, so a wallet with more entries is more likely in each of them, exactly as its share implies.

  4. What do I need to do if I win?

    Nothing. Both prizes are sent to the winning wallets automatically, usually within minutes of the draw.

  5. Where does the prize money come from?

    Two sources. The fee prize is half of the 2% buy and 4% sell fee charged on every trade, so more trading means bigger hourly prizes. The ticket prize is the locked dev supply, unlocking at 16,800,000 $POW a week for 30 weeks. The full breakdown is on the $POW tokenomics page.

  6. What happens after the dev supply runs out?

    The hourly fee prize continues unchanged, for as long as $POW trades. The 100,000 $POW ticket is the launch distribution mechanism, not the whole game.

  7. Can the team win its own lottery?

    No. Every project wallet is excluded from the snapshot, and the exclusion list is public and checkable against each draw's published data.