Dream Big: The $1M Home Crypto Raffle by DeHub

By DeHub Team — 2022-07-02

In Q3 2022 we acquired a $1,000,000 home for what was, at the time, the largest crypto raffle ever run. More than 15,000 people participated.

It did not sell out, and this post exists to say so clearly.

What we were actually testing

The prize was a house. The point was the machinery.

By this stage we had spent nearly a year building provably fair randomisation and on-chain verified raffle mechanics. A raffle with a games prize and a raffle with a million-pound property are the same code and the same trust problem — only the consequences of getting it wrong differ.

Running it at that value was the real test. At £5, nobody scrutinises the draw. At a million, everybody does, and rightly.

What went wrong

Sales did not reach the required minimum.

That threshold existed for a reason: below it, the raffle cannot fairly be drawn, because the prize is worth more than the pot and completing the draw would mean funding it from somewhere other than the entries. Setting a minimum and honouring it is the difference between a raffle and a promise.

What we did about it

Every purchase was refunded.

The minted NFTs retained their value and were incorporated into the app, so participants were not left with a dead asset from a cancelled event. Nobody was asked to absorb a shortfall that was ours to absorb.

That was expensive. We had acquired the property, run the campaign, and carried the costs of both, and the outcome was a full refund. The alternative — drawing anyway, or quietly leaving refunds to whoever chased them hardest — would have been cheaper and would have permanently ended our ability to run anything like it again.

The same reasoning had produced the automatic 1:1 airdrop after the v1 issue the previous year, and it is the same reasoning we applied later to the v2 relaunch. When our thing does not work, the people who backed it do not pay for it.

What we misjudged

The demand, straightforwardly. Fifteen thousand participants is a great many people and it was not enough, which means the entry economics were wrong for the market as it stood in late 2022 — a market that had turned sharply against exactly this kind of discretionary spend.

We also underestimated how much of a raffle's difficulty is not the draw. Acquiring a property, holding it, structuring the offer across jurisdictions and handling refunds at scale is most of the work, and none of it is the part we had spent a year making verifiable.

What came after

Smaller raffles — toys, memberships, holidays — became the sensible format, sized so the minimum is reachable rather than aspirational. The verification machinery carried over unchanged, which was the point of building it properly at small stakes in the first place.

Why we still think it was worth attempting

Because the alternative was never attempting anything at that scale, and a project that only runs things it is certain will succeed is not doing anything interesting.

The failure was in the sizing, which is a genuine and correctable error. It was not in the mechanics, the verification, the fairness of the process or the treatment of participants — every one of those held up under the maximum pressure we could have put on them.

We would rather record a failed attempt at the largest crypto raffle ever run, handled properly, than a series of safe successes. The thing that would have been unforgivable is a shortfall handled quietly, and that is the version this post exists to rule out.