Guides
Prize wheels: great for showing, not enough for proving
A spinning wheel is the right instinct. It is visual, immediate, filmable, shareable, and it stretches three seconds of suspense out of nothing. If you are looking for a wheel for your prize draw, you are looking for the right thing: a wheel is an excellent piece of staging.
It has one limit, and it is structural rather than commercial: a wheel produces a result, never a proof.
The problem fits in one question
Ask yourself what distinguishes, in the video you are about to publish, a wheel spun once from a wheel spun fifteen times until the right name came up.
Nothing. Nothing at all — and that is the whole problem: your honesty does not show. Your audience is not acting in bad faith when it writes “it’s always the same people who win”. It is stating that no verification is possible, and it is right.
The same reasoning covers everything built on the same principle: the filmed random number generator, the name pulled from a hat, the screenshot of a result. These are not bad tools. They are tools that leave no trace.
What to remember
Nothing in your video distinguishes a wheel spun once from a wheel spun fifteen times. What is missing is not the quality of the randomness — it is the trace.
What it would take for a wheel to prove something
Three conditions, none of them exotic — it is the method public lotteries have always used, transposed:
- A commitment made beforehand. You publicly announce, before the draw, something that will determine the result without revealing it. Once published, it cannot be taken back.
- A share of randomness that is not yours. If you supply all of it, people have to take your word. If part of it comes from a public, external source produced after your commitment, you cannot have anticipated it.
- A reveal afterwards. What was sealed is published, and anyone redoes the computation.
These three conditions do not ask anyone to trust the organiser. They make the question moot — which is exactly what a wheel alone cannot offer, however good it is.
You do not have to choose between the two
This is the common misunderstanding: believing you must give up the show to get the proof. You do not.
DrawSeal produces a shareable draw video, with the suspense and the name appearing. The difference is in the order of things: the video is rendered from a result that is already sealed and already verifiable, it does not produce it. It tells the story of the draw; it does not decide it.
Put another way: your competitor’s wheel is the event. Our video is the account of it, and the computation it recounts can be replayed by anyone.
How to check in two minutes, without believing us
The shortest route is not to read us, it is to verify an existing draw: no account, nothing to install, the computation runs in your browser. If you want to see the code that picks the winner, it is published under an open licence — the same code the service runs.
And if you would rather first understand where the share of randomness we do not control comes from, the page on drand explains it without jargon — and the drand project is public.
When a wheel is enough — and there are such cases
Let us be honest: proof is not always needed. Deciding who starts a game, who presents first, which colleague brings the pastries — a wheel does the job perfectly, and worrying about verifiability would be silly.
The dividing line is simple: is there anyone with an interest in contesting the result? If not, take a wheel. If yes — a prize with real value, an audience watching you, a legal obligation — then the staging is no longer enough, and you need something to answer with.
Read next
- Proof of a draw — screenshot, live stream, notary: what each really demonstrates
- Online prize draws — what separates an online draw from a verifiable one
- Running a giveaway — the full path, from prizes to handing over the prize
Frequently asked questions
Is an online prize wheel really random?
Usually yes: it relies on the browser’s random generator, which is good quality. That is not the question. The problem is not the quality of the randomness, it is that you cannot demonstrate afterwards that the wheel was not re-spun until the right result came up.
Can I not just stream the draw live?
A live stream beats an edited video, and it is still weak: it proves a wheel spun once in front of witnesses, not that the list of entrants was untouched beforehand, nor that no name was added or removed. A commitment published before covers what the stream leaves open.
Does DrawSeal have an animation, or only a proof?
Both, in that order. The draw is computed and sealed, then a shareable video is rendered from the result. The animation recounts the draw, it does not decide it — and that is what separates it from a wheel.
Do I need an account to verify a draw?
No. Verification is public, requires no account and runs in the visitor’s browser. That is the condition for it to be worth anything: a proof you have to ask us for is not a proof.
Is it more complicated than a wheel?
For the entrant, no: they sign up and confirm by email. For you there is a real constraint — the commitment must be published at least 24 hours before the draw. That is the price of the demonstration, and there is no instant version that would prove the same thing.