How it works
Real odds. Real prizes.
Belvagio runs capped competitions: small ticket pools, draws you can check yourself, and prizes worth winning. Here is exactly how it all works.
Pool size
Winners
Checkable
Most competitions are designed for the house.
Tens of thousands of tickets per draw. Odds that make a lottery look generous. You spend £5, someone with 800 entries wins, and the site quietly restocks.
Pools of 10,000 or more entries. Your 1-in-10,000 odds are barely better than a scratch card.
No live draw. Just a winner announcement with no way to verify the result.
A car or a luxury watch at 50p a ticket sounds incredible. Until you realise there are 300,000 tickets in the pool. The prize is real. The odds are not.
Most sites have no limit on how many tickets one person can buy. Nothing stops someone from buying 500 entries and taking over the draw. At Belvagio, the number of tickets any one person can hold is kept deliberately low. No single entrant can dominate the pool.
Odds per competition
Other sites
1 in 300,000
Belvagio
1 in 656
Average based on completed Belvagio competitions. Pool sizes range from 100 to 2,000 tickets.
Built around your odds, not ours.
We capped the pools intentionally. Fewer tickets means better odds. That is the whole point.
Capped ticket pools
100 to 2,000 tickets per competition. Not ten thousand. Your ticket is one of a few, not one of a crowd.
Draws you can check
Main draws are decided by a published calculation, with a Bitcoin block we cannot influence. Instant wins use the same method without the block. Either way, you can check the result yourself.
Ticket limit per person
Every competition has a maximum number of tickets any one person can hold. No bulk buyers. No bots clearing the pool. Everyone gets a real chance.
You do not have to take our word for it.
Every Belvagio draw is decided by a calculation you can run yourself, on your own computer, after the draw has finished. Not a video of a wheel. Not a screenshot of a spreadsheet. A number, and the working behind it.
This covers every competition that opened on or after 24 August 2026. Anything that opened before that date ran under our earlier process, without a published key, so there is nothing on those to recalculate.
Before sales open
We commit to a key
We generate a secret key and publish its fingerprint on the competition page. The fingerprint cannot be worked backwards into the key, but the moment we release the key you can prove it is the same one we committed to. We are locked in before you arrive.
When the competition closes
Bitcoin supplies the number we cannot choose
We take the first Bitcoin block mined after closing time and use its hash in the calculation. Nobody knows that number in advance, and that includes us. It is produced by a global network hours after we committed to our key, and there is no version of it we could have arranged.
After the draw
Everything is published
We publish the key, the block, every ticket number in the draw, and the full ranking from first place down. Run the calculation and you should land on the same winner we did. If you do not, we have nowhere to hide.
Run the draw yourself
This runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type here is sent to us, and you can disconnect from the internet before pressing the button.
Ranges and lists both work, for example 1-20 or 1, 4, 9-12.
These are demonstration values for a twenty ticket draw, so you can try the tool before a competition of ours has closed. Every finished competition carries the same tool on its own results page, filled in with that draw's real key, block and ticket numbers.
Instant wins work differently, and we would rather explain why than let you find out.
An instant win is decided the second you buy, so there is no Bitcoin block to bring into it. That block has not been mined yet. Instant tickets are settled by the secret key alone.
That still means every instant result is fixed before sales open, and every one of them is published and checkable once the competition closes. What it does not do is stop us from knowing which numbers win before you do.
So here is what we do about that instead:
- Every address connected to Belvagio, to the people we work with, and to anyone running the site is removed from the draw before the calculation runs, not filtered out afterwards.
- All ticket numbers are published when the competition closes. If winning numbers kept landing in the same hands, it would be sitting there in public for anyone to add up.
We could have left this paragraph off the page. Most sites do.
If you have spent time on a provably fair crypto site, this will look familiar. The principle is the same: commit first, reveal after, let anyone check the working. We have applied it to a physical prize draw, and added a Bitcoin block so that the one thing we cannot do is steer the result.
How to enter a competition.
First time here? Here is exactly what happens when you click Enter.
- 1
Browse live competitions
Head to our competitions page and see everything that is currently live. Each listing shows the prize, ticket price, pool size, and how many entries remain.
- 2
Select your ticket bundle
Most competitions offer multiple bundle options. More tickets means better odds. Pick the bundle that makes sense for you.
There is no subscription and no auto-renewal. You pay once per entry.
- 3
Pay by card or with coins
Pay securely by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay through our payment provider. If you have Belvagio Coins in your account, you can pay with those instead.
- 4
Open your tickets
Your ticket numbers are issued the moment payment completes and sent to you by email. If the competition has instant prizes, you open your tickets straight away and see what each one won.
- 5
Wait for the draw
When the competition closes, a winner is selected by the published calculation. We release the key and the full ranking, results go public within 24 hours, and if you win we contact you directly.
Ready to take a look?
Browse what is live right now. Each competition shows everything upfront: prize, price, pool size, odds.