We’re entering an exciting period in the ICON project, with new ICX services popping up regularly and ICON 2.0 just around the corner. The time has never been better to buy and HODL ICX, but savvy Iconists know that there are lucrative alternatives to just keeping a fat stack in your wallet. A wide range of options exist to grow your ICX assets, including DeFi yield farming with Balanced and ICONFi, and even NFT trading opportunities with Project Nebula or Craft.
That being said, sometimes it can be fun to just win a few prizes.
This ICX Staking Lottery lets you do just that. Built by the Stakin P-Rep team (not to be confused with Staky — they’re the guys who built Winible) the ICX lottery is actually a very efficient system. Unlike every fiat lottery out there, this lottery is zero-risk — all your tickets are fully refundable, even after you’ve used them.
Here’s a breakdown of how it works:
- Each ticket costs one ICX token, paid from your ICX wallet directly into a smart contract.
- The smart contract stakes your ICX tokens on the ICON network, and the whole pool of staking rewards makes up the jackpot for a weekly draw.
- Every Sunday at 12 pm UTC, the smart contract selects a random winner, and automatically deposits the jackpot winnings into their ICX wallet.
- Your tickets carry over week after week, continually giving you a chance at winning again and again. And whenever you’ve had enough, you can withdraw your ICX from the smart contract and go on your merry way.
“It’s like a gamified savings account, in a kind of way,” explains Stakin CEO and Co-Founder Edouard Lavidalle. “The more tickets you buy, the higher your chances of winning.”
“Currently, there’s one user who owns about 20 percent of the total ticket pool, so they win about 20% of the time. That caused some people to call foul, so now we chip in some ICX every week for second and third place prizes.”
The average weekly jackpot is worth around ICX 200 these days, with second and third taking ICX 50 and 25, respectively. Their biggest prize ever was won shortly after the lottery launched — it was worth over ICX 2,000, also largely thanks to sponsorship from Stakin. To date, more than 800 participants have won more than ICX 25,000 in total.
They’ve had other sponsors, too. Balanced DAO hosted a draw for a pool of staking interest and BALN a couple of months ago, and Eye on Icon recently organized a collaborative prize.
One nice feature of the system is that it’ll show you your odds of winning when you buy tickets. It’s a dynamic percentage chance based on the total pool of tickets, which changes week to week. Currently, 100 tickets will get you about a 0.15% chance of winning. At 1000 tickets, you’re at around 1.5% — way better odds than the state lottery!
“The nicest thing about the ICX Staking Lottery is that you never have to worry about forgetting to buy tickets. Or cashing them in. Everything rolls over week after week with automatically distributed winnings, and everything is completely transparent,” Lavidalle explains. “When you log in, it’ll show you a full record of your winning history. It’ll show you who won first prize, and how many tickets they bought. And we don’t touch your funds at any point in time. It’s all managed by the smart contract.”
Head over to lottery.stakin.com to buy your tickets anytime.
Oh, and by the way: Stakin is also actively recruiting for talent. If you’re a developer with a passion for decentralized systems and blockchain, get in touch at or DM @StakinOfficial on Twitter.
