Will Manifold convince me the charity giveaway was fair before the end of March 2026?

Question

Background

Manifold held a charity drawing a couple days ago after a giveaway where users donated mana. I'm attempting to verify the results.

So far I have been unable to verify that the charity giveaway was fair.

They provided a nonce hash during the competition and I am satisfied that the nonce they have provided afterward is the one they used:

Pre-published hash: be763636dd84526263da5fcf76a5749f

Revealed nonce: 3ea815748b401ecf44e0565ff97577758861be9c4a4ce40e7e51bfec71b3e291

So far, this all checks out. The hash matches the revealed nonce. The hash did not change.

However, verifying that the draw was fair requires the timestamps of the last 10 purchases in order to generate the random number. I was able to use the get-charity-giveaway-sales API which happens to include the last 10 purchases and their timestamps:

1772344608000
1772311000000
1772286202000
1772257983000
1772256780000
1772256743000
1772249295000
1772237930000
1772203754000
1772192331000

I used those timestamps and the code supposedly used to select the winner, and got a random value of 0.6683799368020045 which, with the published total ticket sales of 3434266.508031701 tickets would correspond to a winning ticket of number 2295394.831599469.

However, the winning ticket shown on the page is the 2nd to last ticket purchased. It should correspond to a random value of roughly 0.997 (or whatever, I didn't calculate it exactly).

Market resolution criteria:

If Manifold (or anyone, or myself) convinces me the charity giveaway was fair before the end of the month, I'll resolve Yes. If I am not convinced by the end of the month, I will resolve No.

If Manifold announces a new winner or announces there was an error, this resolves No. If they do not change anything and no one convinces me the giveaway was fair, it resolves No.

Possible ways to convince me:

The first likely way I could be convinced is to show me that I have made an error in interpreting the calculations.  I have tried using the code from Manifold's published GitHub repository and also implementing my own take, and got the same 0.668 result both times.  Show me that I have made an error in running the calculations and that running it the right way results in ~0.997.

Maybe I am interpreting the mapping of random value to ticket number incorrectly. Convince me that the 0.668 value corresponds to the shown winning ticket and I'll be happy.

Another way I could be convinced is if someone shows me that the timestamps I was using were incorrect and also presents a plausible case for what the real timestamps are. The get-charity-giveaway-sales API returns timestamps with ms precision but they all appear to be rounded to the nearest second (ending with 000).  I assume this means the timestamps are only stored in the database to the second.  If someone can show me that the database actually stores the timestamps to the ms or greater precision and come up with the true values that result in a random value of ~0.997, that would help. But the database table is not publicly readable.  Manifold would probably be able to fake a result of 0.997 with this strategy so it has to be a believable case.

Perhaps there is some other error, like the API is not correctly returning the last 10 tickets, or anything else.

Manifold Markets · Accepted Answer

Yes — resolved on Mar 6, 2026 by Manifold Markets prediction market.