Chaince

Chaince is a revolutionary Web3-native infrastructure designed to transform the way giveaways are conducted. This platform solves the long-standing issues of fairness, transparency, and user trust that have plagued traditional giveaways on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Patreon. At its core, Chaince offers a decentralized, privacy-first solution that removes middlemen (and their hefty platform fees) while ensuring a provably fair and secure process for both creators and participants.

How it works: Chaince leverages blockchain technology, specifically the Flow blockchain's Verifiable Random Function (VRF), to ensure that every giveaway drawing is completely random, transparent, and verifiable by anyone. This means that participants and creators can trust that every winner is chosen fairly and that there is no room for manipulation or suspicion.

To further safeguard privacy, Chaince uses the Self Protocol for authentication. This allows users to engage with the platform without revealing their personal data to third parties, ensuring their privacy is always respected. Unlike other platforms that sell or leak user data, Chaince stores no sensitive information, empowering users with control over their own data.

The biggest advantage: Chaince operates with a 0% platform fee, unlike traditional platforms like Kickstarter, YouTube Super Chat, or Patreon, which take up to 30% of the funds raised. This means that more rewards go directly to the community—whether it's the creators or the participants. Every penny goes to the people who matter most, with no hidden cuts taken by a centralized platform.

On-chain auditability: With Chaince, anyone can audit the giveaway process through its on-chain transparency. This ensures that the drawing process is not only fair but also fully visible, allowing anyone to check the legitimacy of the winners. This level of transparency builds trust within the community, as participants can easily verify that their chances of winning are equal to everyone else's.

The vision: Chaince is not just about making giveaways fairer—it's about empowering creators and audiences. By eliminating platform fees, giving creators control over the entire process, and ensuring privacy and fairness, Chaince redefines how giveaways work. It provides a decentralized alternative to traditional systems where influencers and platforms often control the process, often leading to trust issues and skepticism. In a world where 60% of Gen Z do not trust influencer giveaways, Chaince aims to rebuild that trust with a platform that operates transparently, securely, and with the community in mind.

With Chaince, creators can host giveaways with confidence, knowing that their followers will trust the process. And participants can engage in giveaways without worrying about rigged contests or having their data exploited. This is the future of community-driven rewards, where fairness, transparency, and trust are the foundation of every interaction.

How Chaince is Built Chaince is a Web3-native giveaway infrastructure, designed to provide a fair, transparent, and privacy-centric platform for giveaways. Built using a combination of modern technologies, Chaince ensures that the entire process—from entry to winner selection—is fully verifiable, secure, and free from platform fees. Here’s a deeper dive into how Chaince is constructed, and how each technology plays a role in achieving its goals.

Frontend Development: Next.js + Tailwind To create a dynamic and responsive frontend, Next.js was chosen for its server-side rendering (SSR) capabilities, allowing us to deliver high-performance pages with optimal SEO benefits. This is crucial when dealing with real-time interactions like live giveaway drawings. Next.js ensures that the site is fast, scalable, and can handle complex user interactions.

For styling, we used Tailwind CSS, a utility-first CSS framework. Tailwind allowed us to rapidly build a visually appealing and responsive design, without the overhead of writing extensive custom CSS. It made it easy to create a polished and modern aesthetic while keeping the codebase lightweight and maintainable.

NFT Generation & Smart Contract Interactions: Thirdweb Chaince generates NFTs for giveaway participants, adding a layer of transparency and verification to the process. Thirdweb was integrated for its simple yet powerful SDK that allows easy interaction with the blockchain, minting NFTs directly from the frontend. Each participant receives an NFT as proof of entry, which can later be referenced to verify the legitimacy of the drawing process. The integration of Thirdweb’s SDK ensures seamless wallet connectivity and smart contract interaction, enabling automatic NFT minting upon entry.

Blockchain Technologies: Flow & Self Protocol At the core of Chaince’s fairness and transparency is the Flow blockchain, specifically utilizing Flow’s Verifiable Random Function (VRF). This cryptographic function ensures that the giveaway drawing process is completely random, verifiable, and tamper-proof. Participants can trust that winners are selected fairly, without any external influence, and that the process is auditable by anyone.

For authentication, Self Protocol was incorporated, enabling privacy-first authentication. Self Protocol ensures that users can authenticate without disclosing personal data, allowing Chaince to operate in a privacy-respecting manner. With Self Protocol, data never leaves the user’s control, reinforcing Chaince’s commitment to data privacy.

Authentication: Magic Link To further streamline user authentication and improve the experience, we used Magic Link, a passwordless authentication system. Magic Link allows users to log in with just an email link, eliminating the need for passwords while maintaining a secure and frictionless login process. By integrating Magic Link into Chaince, users can quickly authenticate without worrying about password management, and the system ensures that authentication is both easy and secure. This improves the user experience by making it simpler for participants to engage with the platform and enter giveaways without unnecessary barriers.

Partner Technologies: Bolt.new & Cursor Bolt.new assisted with critical backend infrastructure, helping us to handle multiple concurrent giveaways and ensuring that our platform could scale smoothly as user demand increased. The platform helped us build the necessary server architecture to handle large datasets and real-time interactions without compromising performance.

Cursor, a no-code tool, enabled us to efficiently manage and track data related to giveaways and user interactions. It gave us the ability to monitor and manage giveaway entries, as well as track results, all without needing complex custom backend logic. This partnership allowed us to focus on refining the user-facing features while Cursor took care of the backend management.

Hacky Details: How We Made It Work One of the most important aspects of Chaince's giveaway system is ensuring the process of selecting winners is both fair and transparent. To achieve this, we used Flow's Verifiable Random Function (VRF), which is a cryptographic tool that ensures the randomness of the winner selection is both provable and tamper-resistant.

To further enhance the security and trust of the randomization process, we adopted the commit-reveal pattern when generating the random numbers for selecting winners. This pattern is crucial for ensuring that no one, including the creator of the giveaway, can influence the outcome once the process is initiated.

Here’s how the commit-reveal pattern works within the context of Flow VRF:

Commit Phase:

The creator of the giveaway commits to a random seed before initiating the drawing process. This seed is "hidden" and used as the basis for generating the random number later.

By committing to the random seed in advance, the creator guarantees that the randomness will be determined fairly and cannot be influenced or manipulated after the commitment. This step ensures that the draw is tamper-proof, as the outcome cannot be changed once the seed is locked.

Reveal Phase:

Once the entry period is over, the creator reveals the random seed. This is when Flow VRF is triggered to generate the actual random number based on the committed seed.

The Flow VRF generates a verifiable random number that can be cross-checked by anyone, ensuring the process is both secure and transparent.

The winner is then selected based on this verified random number, and the process can be audited by anyone in the community, ensuring transparency and fairness.

By using this commit-reveal pattern, Chaince ensures that no one can "rig" the drawing by changing the random seed or altering the process once it has started. This method creates a provable, auditable way for users to verify the integrity of each giveaway, building trust within the community.

This approach is particularly important in the Web3 space, where transparency and security are critical to establishing credibility. The commit-reveal pattern is a vital element that guarantees the integrity of Chaince's winner selection process and reassures users that the drawing is both fair and irreversible.

In combination with Flow's VRF, this method ensures that the giveaways on Chaince are truly random, auditable, and trustworthy, empowering creators and participants alike to engage in a fully transparent process.