What is BurnBola?
BurnBola is a lottery that runs entirely on the Solana blockchain. The name is a mash-up of burn and tombola — and that's exactly what it is: a tombola where the barrel doesn't draw one winner out, it burns the losers away, round after round, until a single ticket remains.
Three properties define it:
1. Deflationary
In a normal lottery the prize grows while your odds stay microscopic. BurnBola flips that. Once a game starts, nothing dilutes the bank — even a mid-game entrant must pay the full live value of a seat, so the players already in lose nothing. What shrinks is the number of tickets: exactly half of all live tickets burn each round. Fewer claimants on the same bank means every survivor's slice keeps growing. A ticket can be worth several times its price within a few rounds — not as a promise, but as arithmetic.
2. Exit-friendly
After every burn round, an exit window opens. During the window you can sell any of your live tickets back to the game at a fixed, published price — and that price is always higher than what you paid. You choose every round: take the guaranteed profit now, or risk the burn for a bigger share. The jackpot waits for whoever risks longest. (Details: Exiting.)
3. Autonomous
No one can rig the draws. The game's rules live in a Solana smart contract; randomness and payouts are enforced on-chain, not by us. Every phase transition — starting the game, drawing randomness, burning tickets, paying the winner — is sent automatically by a Keeper that runs every game; the contract decides what's allowed, the Keeper just nudges it to the next step. The interface (our Telegram Mini App) is just a convenient window into the contract; the contract doesn't need it to function. (Details: How a game runs itself and On-chain & non-custodial.)
The numbers at a glance
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Ticket price | fixed per league — shown in the app |
| Tickets to start a game | 100 minimum (Shrimp) · 10 minimum (Whale) |
| Maximum game size | 40 000 tickets |
| Per-wallet limit | 100 tickets per game |
| Burned per round | exactly ⌊N/2⌋ of live tickets |
| Chance to survive a round | ≥ 50% (above 50% when N is odd) |
| Exit windows | after every burn round, 108 000 blocks (~12h) each |
| Winner takes | the remaining bank + the entire jackpot |
One ticket's story
Alice buys one ticket for 1 SOL in a game of 100 tickets. (1 SOL is just an example price — at any other price every number below scales with it.)
- Round 1. Half of the 100 tickets burn. Alice survives — the odds were exactly 50%. An exit window opens: her ticket can now be sold back for about 1.62 SOL. She stays.
- Round 2. Half of the survivors burn again. Alice survives. Exit price now about 2.9 SOL. She stays.
- Round 3. Alice survives again. Exit price about 5.5 SOL — over 5× her buy-in. She stays.
- Round 4. Alice's ticket burns. Her stake remains in the bank for the survivors.
Had Alice exited at any window, she'd have left with more than she paid. She gambled for the top prize instead and lost — to someone who held one round longer. The last ticket standing takes the whole remaining bank plus the jackpot that accumulated from round commissions along the way.
That's the entire game: a simple, brutal, transparent tournament of nerve — with a profitable fire escape on every floor.