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, the bank is locked — no new money dilutes it. 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 that cost 0.1 SOL can be worth multiples of that 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

There is no operator who runs the draws. The game's rules live in a Solana smart contract; every phase transition — starting the game, drawing randomness, burning tickets, paying the winner — is triggered by players themselves, who earn small on-chain rewards for pressing the button. The interface (our Telegram Mini App) is just a convenient window into the contract; the contract doesn't need it to function. (Details: Spinning and On-chain & non-custodial.)

The numbers at a glance

Parameter	Value
Ticket price	0.1 SOL, fixed
Tickets to start a game	100 minimum
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, ~12 hours each
Winner takes	the remaining bank + the entire jackpot

One ticket's story

Alice buys one ticket for 0.1 SOL in a game of 100 tickets.

• 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 0.162 SOL. She stays.
• Round 2. Half of the survivors burn again. Alice survives. Exit price now about 0.29 SOL. She stays.
• Round 3. Alice survives again. Exit price about 0.55 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.