Frequently asked questions
Straight answers about what's provable, what still relies on us, and how to check any of it yourself. For the formal treatment, see the whitepaper.
Is the draw actually fair?
What stops the house from picking your card.
No. Your card is decided by a verifiable random function (ECVRF) over a seed that includes the hash of the block your purchase settled in, a value that does not exist until after you commit funds. For one seed and one published key there is exactly one valid result, and every draw carries an 80-byte proof. If we swapped your card, that proof would fail against our published key. You can replay the whole thing yourself on Verify a Rip.
Yes. The draw runs on our servers, so we compute your card before you see it. But seeing a result is not choosing it. The proof binds us to the single outcome the published key produces for your seed. We cannot hand you a different card than the math dictates without the proof failing. It is foreknowledge, not control.
No. Every set's lineup is committed with a Merkle root before its first rip. Any card added, removed, or swapped changes that root, so a post-publication edit is publicly detectable. Browse the committed lineups on Sets.
Proven. The set-building algorithm, the Fair Set Algorithm, is open-source, and we publish the exact inputs each set was built from (the candidate pool at its finality checkpoint, the configuration, and the block reference). Anyone can re-run it and confirm that the published tier bands, the expected-value window, and the guaranteed top-tier minimum were actually met for that set, rather than simply asserted. You can view the built lineup and its odds for any set on Sets.
Who's in control?
Where you still rely on us today, stated plainly.
To verify, no. Verification needs only public data and our published key, and runs entirely in your browser. To enter, today Renaiss submits the on-chain funding transaction on your behalf, which does make us a gatekeeper for entry. We acknowledge that. Permissionless submission, so anyone can rip without us in the loop, is on our roadmap.
A paid checkout with no recorded draw is publicly visible, and there is no re-roll path. We can't quietly discard a result we don't like, only fail to publish it. Producing the proof still requires our key today. Hardening resolution liveness, so that a stuck draw can always be forced to settle, is part of the same roadmap as permissionless entry.
At the moment you commit funds, yes. The block that seeds your draw has not been produced, so nobody, including us, can know its hash. There is, however, a small degree of influence we can't rule out: the validator who ends up producing that block has some say over its own hash. That is why we trust the chain, not Renaiss, for entropy, and we state the assumption plainly in the whitepaper's Limitations.
Verify it yourself
Everything above is checkable without trusting us.
Open Verify a Rip, paste your transaction, and step through it: the seed is recomputed from public values, the ECVRF proof is verified in your browser, and the randomness maps to exactly one slot in the set. It uses no key and no database, and it does not require trusting our software.
A set is a fixed lineup of cards, committed before its first rip and drawn down without replacement. Every set, whether live, ripped out, or upcoming, is browsable on Sets.
The whitepaper covers the construction end to end: the seed formula, the ECVRF suite, the Merkle commitment, the append-only ledger, and a candid security analysis.