Here’s exactly how the winning ticket was chosen, and why no one could choose it.
No one at the wedding picks the winner. Not Tyler and Nicole, not the organizers, and not this website. Here’s what happens instead.
All 731 tickets were put in a fixed order and sealed with a digital fingerprint: a code that changes completely if even one ticket is added, removed, or moved.
At that same moment, the site reserved random number #32960296, due 5 minutes later. It comes from drand, a free public service run by independent organizations, including Cloudflare and several universities. drand releases a new random number every few seconds. No one can predict one ahead of time or change it afterward.
drand released number #32960296 publicly, for anyone in the world to see.
The site mixes that number with the sealed list’s fingerprint, then divides by 731, the number of tickets. The amount left over picks the ticket: 0 means the 1st ticket in the list, 1 means the 2nd, and so on. This time 299 was left over, so ticket #300 won: TKT-JDU9-CK6T.
No. The list isn’t in order of who bought first, or by name. Each ticket gets a random code when it’s bought, and the list is sorted by those codes, so every ticket’s spot is itself random.
Because the list is sealed before the random number exists, no one can move a ticket into a lucky spot. Every spot has the same chance: 1 in 731. The winner happened to be #300 in line.
The fingerprints, random number, and math behind the steps above. Anyone can check them.
731 sorted, privacy-safe ticket IDs and serials
Scheduled Oct 10, 2026, 9:04 PM CDT
SHA-256 rejection sampling; no modulo bias
a7da38ed8364a02b9284a1be68034abe6559bfbf6137dbd5421ec42fb9a20ee3This check downloads the committed drand round, re-hashes the manifest and commitment, and independently derives the winning index.