Daily Lotteries and Raffles in Trading Competitions

Most competition leaderboards are a size contest. The trader with the most counted volume takes the biggest slice, and everyone below the top ranks is playing for scraps. A daily raffle exists to break that — it is the one part of a competition where a $10,000 day and a $10,000,000 day are worth exactly the same.

Here is the whole mechanism, end to end.

Qualification is a bar, not a ladder

A competition with a raffle configures one number: the daily volume needed to enter that day's draw. On Voltrade this is dailyLotteryVolumeUsd. Clear it and you are in the draw. Clear it ten times over and you are still in the draw — once.

Three configurations exist, and the draw picks whichever the competition set:

The threshold is checked against counted volume for the day — the same capped number that feeds the leaderboard, not your raw turnover. On a competition where the daily cap sits far above the raffle bar, that distinction rarely bites. On one where they are close, it does. See counted volume versus raw volume for why the two numbers differ at all.

The odds are deliberately flat

The winner is picked uniformly at random from the eligible list. One entry per eligible participant, no weighting by volume, points, or rank. A trader who cleared the bar by a dollar has exactly the same chance as the trader sitting first on the leaderboard.

This is a design choice, not an oversight. Weighting entries by volume would make the raffle a second leaderboard — the same people winning the same money by the same mechanism. Flat odds make it the part of the prize pool that a small account can realistically expect to touch.

One winner is drawn per period. There is no partial prize, no split, no runner-up.

Days are anchored to the start, not to midnight

This is the detail that costs people draws.

A competition's day windows are rolling 24-hour blocks measured from its start time. A competition starting at 12:00 UTC rolls its day at 12:00 UTC. "Day 3" means the third 24 hours since the start — not the third calendar date.

The first draw fires one full interval after the start. Daily raffles draw every 24 hours; weekly raffles every 7 days. Draw generation is clamped to the competition's actual duration, so no draw is created for time after the end. The job that runs the draws checks hourly and is idempotent — one draw per competition per period, and re-running it never double-pays.

If you are planning your trading around a raffle, plan it around the competition clock. Trading $12,000 between 09:00 and 11:00 UTC on a competition that rolls at 12:00 puts that volume in the window that is about to close, not the one that just opened.

The prize money is not extra

This is the part competition pages should state plainly, and the honest ones do.

Raffle prizes come out of the same advertised prize pool as the leaderboard payouts. The total reserved is simply the per-draw prize multiplied by the number of draws the competition will run, and the main pool that the leaderboard splits is the advertised pool minus that reserve.

Worked through on a real structure — a 3,000-token pool running 14 days with a 25-token daily draw:

Every projected reward you see on a leaderboard is computed against the 2,650, not the 3,000. A page that projects payouts from the full advertised number is over-promising by exactly the raffle reserve. This is also why the number of draws matters as much as the per-draw prize: a $100 daily draw over 30 days is $3,000 off the top.

What a raffle does to your expected value

For a small account, the raffle is often the larger half of the opportunity, and the arithmetic is unusually clean.

Suppose 200 traders clear the daily bar and the draw pays 25 tokens. Your expected value from that draw is 25 ÷ 200 = 0.125 tokens. Over 14 draws with a stable field, that is 1.75 tokens — and it does not depend at all on where you sit on the leaderboard.

Now compare that with the main pool. In a pro-rata competition, your expected share is your counted volume divided by the total counted volume of the qualifying field. If you are 0.05% of that field, you get 0.05% of 2,650 tokens — 1.3 tokens. Below some size, the raffle is genuinely worth more to you than the leaderboard, and clearing the daily bar with the minimum necessary volume is the efficient play. Above that size, the leaderboard dominates and the raffle is a rounding error.

Two honest caveats. First, the field size is not fixed — it changes daily, and a draw with 20 eligible traders is worth ten times one with 200. Second, expected value is not a payout. Most traders in most raffles win nothing, because that is what a lottery is.

Challenges draw differently

Entry-fee PnL challenges run their raffle on a separate path, because their prize pool is funded by entry tickets rather than seeded up front. Three differences matter:

• Every draw is solvency-checked. A draw only fires if the entry-funded pool can actually cover it. An underfunded day is skipped rather than promised.
• Eligibility is stricter. A line must be paid, not refunded, past the flat-start gate, and above the challenge's minimum volume — and it must have traded inside that specific draw's 24-hour window. Trading once on day one does not keep you in later draws.
• Draws stop at settlement. Once a challenge is settled the pool is committed, so no draw can be written after it. Final draws run inside settlement itself.

What the page should tell you

Before you enter a competition with a raffle, four numbers decide whether it is worth targeting: the qualifying volume per day, the prize per draw, the draw frequency, and the total reserved for draws. A competition page that shows the reserve separately from the main pool is telling you the truth about what the leaderboard is actually splitting.

Browse live competitions, or read how projected rewards are calculated for what happens to the rest of the pool.