VERA | Devpost

Inspiration

Humanity thrives when we collaborate together. But collaboration requires trust between people. Trust takes years to build, only seconds to break, and forever to repair. Creating trust is the most difficult when there are random decisions involved that affect multiple people. These are only valid if everyone agrees that they were really random.

From unfair giveaways to opaque visa lotteries and rigged exam question selection, we have witnessed countless instances where "random" decisions were anything but that. A particularly striking example was when we learned that a $10,000 random giveaway on X, which was funded by public funds, was rigged by the organizer in favor of their alternate account. These abuses not only erode public confidence but also sabotage the original intent of such systems to increase engagement and user interest.

VERA was born out of these personal experiences and frustrations. We wanted to build a tool that could restore faith in the randomness the humanity relies on, by making it transparent, verifiable, and tamper-proof.

What it does

VERA is a platform that delivers verifiable randomness in a simple, convenient, and affordable way. With verifiable randomness combined with blockchain technology, users can be sure that the random draws are fair, transparent, and resilient to manipulation. VERA achieves this by using a verifiably random function, which is a cryptographic primitive that creates a random number and a proof of its generation based on a given seed. Anyone can independently verify result. Moreover, VERA uses an immutable blockchain to store commitments to the draw results, as well as to provide a robust and difficult to manipulate seed for the random generation. This creates a transparent audit trail that anyone can verify. Enabling people to trust the result of the draw - from influencers and other giveaway organizers to educators, quality assurance engineers and regulator auditors as well as the general public. Trust is built with VERA.

VERA users can get the verifiable randomness via an API or use it with one of many supported integrations. For example, a Discord or other social media platform integrations can be used to increase brand trust through online giveaways. VERA can be integrated also in custom enterprise and government applications. To create a draw, a user must only register, schedule the draw, and share its ID. Participants can then independently verify if they have been entered in the draw and check the result when the draw is made - which cannot be manipulated thanks to VERA.

How we built it

VERA consists of the following 5 pillars: 1) A web applications for users to conveniently check draw proofs, create new draws or manage their subscriptions. This was created with Bolt.new using TypeScript, Vite, and TailwindCSS for a fast, responsive frontend that created a great user experience. 2) A highly-decentralized and secure public blockchain - Algorand - for storing immutable commitments and proofs of the draws as well as generating a difficult-to-manipulate seed for the generation of the random numbers. 3) A verifiable randomness generation service, where the randomness beacon of Algorand Foundation is currently used. 4) A database and backend service for managing the draws and abstracting blockchain interactions away from the users. Supabase was used as the database, which is changed via the web applications according to users' actions. A Python backend service was also created to listen to the database changes and respond with corresponding blockchain interactions. Supabase was also used for authentication layer. 5) Another Python backend service operating a Discord bot which enables verifiably random giveaways in Discord - as one example of integrations with social media platforms.

Challenges we ran into

User experience: We had to translate highly technical concepts (like VRFs, cryptographic proofs and blockchain) into an experience that anyone can use and understand.
Immutable and affordable storage: Balancing cost and transparency for storing draws on-chain required architectural compromises and optimizations.
Ensuring the system is resilient to manipulation: Randomness is only as trustworthy as its weakest link, which required studying and evaluating different solutions, which in the end led to the Algorand blockchain.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A working, verifiable randomness demo through our web application as well as Discord integration.
Strong UI/UX design, enabling non-technical users to access and understand cryptographically secure randomness with blockchain being completely abstracted away from them.
Creating a solution that will have major impact on the world by increasing the trust between people.

What we learned

People feel too often betrayed because of the broken trust. They feel powerless - as if this is a part of the world we live in and that there is nothing that can be done about it. But we want to show the world that with tools like VERA a real change is possible - by thinking outside of the box and create seemingly paradoxical solutions like the verifiable randomness. We also learned that Blockchain is not just about money or tokens; it is a powerful trust layer when used thoughtfully and that it can be made accessible to users with careful abstractions.