Anatomy of a Crypto Collectible Raffle
How we held our first raffle on Editional with redeemable NFTs
At Editional we’ve always wanted to explore the depth of the crypto-collectible / NFT medium beyond the image itself. The most common question we get asked about digital collectibles from those who are unfamiliar with blockchain is “what’s the difference between owning one of these and a screenshot?”
The native mobile experience of crypto collectibles on Editional gives us the rare opportunity to finally make redeeming NFTs easy.
The answers we tend to give include describing how collectibles can:
- grant explicit rights to content (such as the right to resell or display)
- provide an easy-to-use owner/creator relationship
- grant owners access to private, personalized content or events
That last one is one of the easiest to explain but has historically been impractical on existing collectible platforms where the process of authenticating ownership to grant access has been pretty messy, requiring desktop bolt-on wallets and confusing web3 interfaces.
Luckily, the native mobile experience of crypto collectibles on Editional gives us the rare opportunity to finally make redeeming NFTs easy. We came up with the raffle idea as an easy-to-understand way to start experimenting with making these collectibles-as-keys experiences easy and understandable.
The Plan
On Monday we announced the giveaway on twitter. Josie Bellini, a well known and amazing crypto artist was kind enough to be part of the experiment with us and let us offer one of her prints as a prize.
Josie was also was kind enough to design the ticket for us, which we planned to distribute in a limited quantity through Editional.
The plan was that on Thursday at 8pm, we would make the tickets available, users would be given an in-app button to redeem the ticket, and only one would result in the “you won!” experience.
The NFT Ticket
The NFT/cryptocollectible is a magical media type — it envelopes all existing media. Today on Editional we focus on artwork and images, where the NFT provides an ownership record for a specific edition and along with that ownership, the user has the ability to trade, sell, or transfer your owned works.
For the raffle ticket, we needed to also enable a new concept of redemption within the app and we needed it to be easy and obvious. The solution was pretty straightforward: put a giant “REDEEM” button in bright orange if you’re an owner of the raffle ticket
Redemption
We built the basic redemption flow on web3 to be flexible and extendable, but that meant it was running outside our native app code so redeeming the ticket itself was a 3-part process that had to feel simple:
- Validate that the viewer owns the wallet they claim to own
- Check which edition of the ticket that wallet owns
- Return a winning vs. no-win result depending on the token_id
Luckily Editional has a built-in web3 browser that is used to connect to app partners like Opensea which we were able to leverage, so this was all pretty plug-and-play once we had the basic concept down.
We verify wallet ownership through a private-key signed web3 message that costs no gas, record that signed message, and then process the win/no-win serverside based on a randomly selected ticket number.
We have a winner!
The raffle ran on Thursday at 8pm and all the tickets were claimed within minutes. A winner emerged (Edition 7 of 20 was the winning ticket) and the first Editional NFT / cryptocollectible raffle was complete!
More to come
The great thing about NFTs and crypto collectibles is that the redeemability can be dynamic. We can reshuffle the tickets to offer runner-up prizes, or offer other types of digital and physical access rights to the holders in the future.
We think this is just the beginning — stay tuned, grab the app, and follow us on twitter for more raffles and crypto collectible fun!
