Building a Decentralized Soccer Raffle Platform: A Deep Dive Series
You can watch the video for this article here
I’ve been exploring the Lisk Protocol and wanted to dive deeper into its capabilities. To get hands-on experience, I decided to build a practical project — something simple yet meaningful — that goes beyond the usual DeFi tropes like lending pools, meme tokens, and NFT collectibles.
Enter the Decentralized Soccer Raffle Platform: a blockchain-powered system that lets users participate in provably fair raffles using smart contracts. Every draw is transparent, every reward verifiable, and there’s no need to trust any intermediary or opaque process.
This project demonstrates how decentralized systems can power familiar, real-world experiences — such as football raffles, community prize pools, or prediction games — in a trustless, fair, and global way.
The Use Case
Admins can create a raffle for any football match, setting parameters like minimum bet, maximum participants, and duration. Users then join the raffle using the platform’s native token.
For example: in May 2024, when PSG faced Inter Milan in the Champions League final, an admin could have created a raffle for fans to participate in — fully transparent and automated.
The Business Case: Fairness Meets Engagement
Traditional online raffles have a critical flaw: opacity. Users often have no way of verifying whether winners were selected fairly, even in regulated platforms. Centralized systems rely on private databases, hidden random number generation, and trust in a middleman.
With blockchain, we can ensure:
- Transparency: All logic is on-chain. Anyone can verify outcomes.
- Fairness: Random draws are auditable and provably fair.
- Accessibility: Users worldwide can participate with a wallet.
- Automation: Smart contracts handle payouts — no manual intervention.
And the real-world appeal is immediate: sports fans already understand raffles. We’re not teaching blockchain; we’re enhancing a familiar experience with decentralized fairness.
The Challenge: Bridging Web3 and Web2
While the decentralized logic runs on-chain, we still need:
- Efficient user session management
- Real-time updates
- Off-chain storage for metadata
- A smooth interface for blockchain interactions
Our tech stack balances Web3 transparency with Web2 convenience:
- Smart Contracts (Solidity): Handle raffle logic, token flows, and fairness
- Firebase Backend: Offloads reads, manages metadata, and reduces on-chain gas costs
- Flutter Frontend: Delivers a slick, animated mobile experience with wallet integration
This architecture allows us to scale a blockchain product without compromising user experience or decentralization — a challenge every modern dApp faces.
Level of Complexity
This is not a quick tutorial. It’s a full-stack blockchain build spanning Solidity, Firebase, and Flutter — the kind of project that transforms intermediate developers into full-spectrum Web3 engineers.
By the end of this series, you’ll have deployed:
- A custom ERC20 raffle token
- A provably fair raffle smart contract on Lisk Sepolia
- A serverless backend to interact with contracts off-chain
- A Flutter app that connects wallets, tracks transactions, and provides animated, user-friendly UI
If you’ve ever wanted to understand how a complete decentralized product is architected — from blockchain to backend to mobile — this series is your blueprint.
Article Series Roadmap
This is a three-part deep dive, designed to be read sequentially or independently:
Article 1: Smart Contracts & Backend Infrastructure
Design and deploy Solidity contracts, set up the ERC20 token, and connect Firebase Cloud Functions for off-chain support. By the end, you’ll have a working blockchain backend ready for frontend integration.
Article 2: Flutter Architecture & Core Services
Build the app’s Flutter architecture: wallet management, blockchain transactions, and reactive state management to keep the UI in sync with blockchain data in real time.
Article 3: UI Implementation & Production Deployment
Bring everything together with a production-ready UI, performance optimizations, security hardening, and a full launch checklist.
Who This Series Is For
This series is for builders — developers eager to go beyond tutorials and understand how decentralized apps are architected end-to-end.
Whether you’re:
- A Solidity developer curious about UI integration
- A Flutter engineer exploring Web3
- A founder testing a blockchain business idea
…you’ll find tremendous value in seeing how the layers fit together.
Coming Up Next
Part 1: Building the Foundation — Smart Contracts & Serverless Backend
We’ll start by designing the raffle logic in Solidity, creating our ERC20 token, and setting up Firebase Cloud Functions for secure off-chain reads and writes. By the end, you’ll have a fully functional blockchain backend ready to connect to your frontend.
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