SolLotto Dev Recap — July

July was a fantastic month of progress for the development of the SolLotto platform and protocol. In this dev recap we’re going to cover some of the most important developments that have occurred this month.

Phantom Integration

We started July by finishing our integration with the most popular wallet on Solana, Phantom! From their clean and easy to use UI to their ability to support NFTs, we knew Phantom would be the best choice for users of the SolLotto platform. Phantom is now available for anyone to use without an access code, we are delighted to promote their wallet on our platform and look forward to the developments they have in store!

Traditional Lottery Contract Redevelopment

This month we made noticeable progress in developing our smart contract protocols. We hired a premier financial services development company with extensive experience in both blockchains and Rust to take our platform to the next level in terms of performance and security. Our new contract for the traditional (pick 6) lottery model not only writes our user’s ticket choices and charity selections on-chain for community verification, but also automatically transfers the winning share and charity portion of the prize pool to the respective winners. Our final step to getting this launched on Solana’s mainnet is transitioning the function which selects the winning numbers from a backend random number generating package to an on-chain, verifiable random function that will be powered by the Switchboard team.

Traditional Lottery Protocol & Major UI Changes

We also made significant changes to how our traditional lottery model works based on feedback we received from the community during our alpha testing. Instead of the first five numbers being selected from the range 1–69, we modified this to make it easier for users to win a jackpot by reducing the range of possible numbers to 1–49. Additionally, we are in the process of introducing lower-tier rewards for various partial matches with the winning numbers. We also introduced random ticket generation for users looking to pick numbers at random, improving the speed and ease-of-use for our most active lottery participants. For security purposes we will not be releasing any of our source code until we have undergone an official audit of our smart contracts.

Upcoming Integration with Switchboard

It’s (almost) official! We will be working with the Switchboard team to utilize the verifiable random function they are currently developing. While we can’t give an exact timeline for their team, we’re hopeful we are less than a month away from integrating with the Switchboard VRF and launching the first step of our platform on Solana’s mainnet!

No Loss Lottery Contract Development

You may have seen the ‘Pools’ page with a “coming soon” message on our website — if you were wondering what that is, we’re ready to officially announce that our model 2, the No Loss Lottery is nearing completion! We’ve developed all of the smart contracts and protocol logic necessary, and are waiting for a liquid staking partner as our final step before deployment! This protocol will be available for other teams to utilize for a nominal fee both with SOL and other SPL based tokens. For security purposes we will not be releasing any of our source code until we have undergone an official audit of our smart contracts.

Raffle Functionality for IDOs or Other Community Giveaways

While it wasn’t on our initial roadmap, we received a request to help Grape Protocol select five random winners from their gated PAI (Parrot) community for Parrot Protocol’s IDO and our dev team rose to the occasion! We’ve created a custom interface that any Solana user can use to hold on-chain verifiable raffles and giveaways. Currently access to this tool is restricted to SolLotto team members, but we are actively seeking new partnerships and opportunities to put this tool into action for other community projects! If you know of a project hosting a giveaway and they want to make it a more fair and verifiable process, tell them to get in contact with us!

Charity Nomination Process in Alpha-Test

We’ve introduced our community-driven charity nomination process to the SolLotto alpha-test! Charities are still selected for inclusion by undergoing the SolLotto Team’s verification process, however SolLotto users now have the ability to vote on which of the verified charities will be included in the voting on the next traditional lottery drawing. Currently, all users are given 10 votes to allocate between the charities on the devnet however they wish. Eventually the number of votes each user has will be based on how much SOL they’ve staked in our No Loss Lottery.

Charity Auction Platform is Live & Auctions Starting Soon

Using the Metaplex template we’ve also launched SolLotto Auctions, a platform where artists can collaborate with Team SolLotto to create unique NFT artwork where a large portion of the proceeds are donated directly to charity. Our first series, the SolLotto Space Balls will start in late July and run through early September. We will be auctioning one of our futuristic lottery balls each day. The collection has been meticulously designed by the artist Dooi and the charity proceeds for each piece will be donated to the FTX Foundation for their continued mission of effective giving.

General UX Improvements

While we covered the major developments above, we have been hard at work making the user experience on our dApp as seamless as possible. We’ve taken a second look at everything, from error messages to mobile responsiveness. Some of our most popular improvements include showing links to ticket purchase transactions on solscan.io, displaying wallet balances, and additional authoritative sources for charity verifications (GiveWell.org). As always we are still accepting feedback on our platform and will continue to listen to what our users want to make this the best decentralized lottery platform in cryptocurrency.