dRaffle Luck Club

dRaffle Luck Club landing page
First raffle ever open to users, we replicated prizes we prepared on mainnet to mitigate risks
Responsive design for our explore raffle page
Responsive design on the raffle page
Naked tRuffle, minted for our test raffle.
Winner screenshot of the test raffle
First mainnet raffle overview card
First mainnet raffle winners!
Our empty token account closing tool, well received
Winning ticket per prize production flow diagram

Inspiration

We have noticed the acceleration of NFTs on Solana. However, while many projects just sell NFTs, we felt some interactivity was missing. We also observed that blue chip NFTs are quickly too expensive for the average person while they allow to be part of great communities. As a result we decided to create a system that allows anyone to buy their ticket for a chance to win a blue chip NFT, at an affordable price.

What it does

Decentralized raffling of any token, with a focus on NFT for now, but it can do any kind of token.

We provide a simple web application that allows the display of the prizes, buying tickets and a few animation around reveal and special animations for the winners!

How we built it

We built it using our knowledge building other Solana projects, we had a prototype up in no time thanks to the anchor framework abstraction.

We learnt from chainlink VRF documentation, while not having VRF we follow other best practices

Challenges we ran into

While we believe we have a strong technical base, the hardest part was to create trust with our users and build a community. Marketing is not easy, we are still looking for ways to get exposure and grow our community bigger, it is essential that this dApp is widely known so we can raise the value of the NFTs we raffle while lowering the ticket price.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have done a test raffle that has been conducted using a localnet open to the outside world with a reverse proxy, this allowed for a quick infra setup, replayability (all scenarios are scripted). Only ~36 people joined but we had fun and they had some too.

First mainnet raffle has taken place shortly after, 65 tickets have been sold for 3 prizes.

What we learned

While VRF is not available, we can create pseudo-randomness using price feeds. This is obviously not perfect but this allows to ship a product quickly without waiting for VRF to land.

What's next for dRaffle Luck Club

Refine the dApp, explore partnerships and rework some scalability issues the dApp will surely face. We want to collaborate with projects to also explore fungible token raffles.

Bonus

We have introduced a dRaffle Community Token (DCT), airdropped 1 to all our early adopters, this will give them access to the first mainnet raffles for free. We might keep using it to gate free raffle.

To entertain our users between the discord creation and the first raffle we introduced a fun community staking program, which was quick to build but created traction and interest. We distributed the dRaffle community token (DCT) to users and they are free to stake to increase their chances to win in later raffles.

Another growth hack trick was to create a token account closer tool, which we added to our website. This has created traffic and people got to know we can ship quickly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2WwYZTq184

Features by the Metaverse Explorer https://youtu.be/bMDBIijeAbI?t=266

Interview with the Metaverse Explorer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvN6ywjNmF0&ab_channel=MetaVerseExplorer