Frequently asked questions
Getting started
You have never played here before.
What is SolanaJack?
An online casino where you play against other people instead of against the house. Blackjack, a shared roulette wheel, and a trading duel. It is not a company running a website: the casino IS a program on the Solana blockchain, running on thousands of independent computers at once. That makes it decentralized in the way the word is supposed to mean. There is no server we could switch off, no database we could edit, and no account we could close. It is uncensorable: every action is a public instruction that anybody may send, so nobody can ban a player, block a country or veto a game, including us. It is self-custody: your money never leaves your own wallet to sit in a house balance. It goes straight into the escrow for one game and straight back out to the winner. There is no deposit, no withdrawal, no registration and no KYC. And it is all readable: every bet, card, spin and payout is a public transaction that anybody can inspect and re-derive for themselves.
Do I need an account?
No. No registration, no email, no password, no KYC, and no deposit to a house balance. You connect a wallet and play. Your money stays in your own custody until the moment it enters a game, and it returns straight to your wallet when the game ends. There is nothing for us to hold, freeze, or refuse to pay out.
Which wallets work?
Any wallet that supports the Solana Wallet Standard: Phantom, Solflare, Backpack, Coinbase Wallet and others. On a phone, open solanajack.com inside your wallet's own browser.
What can I bet with?
SOL, or USDT. Those are the only two. Blackjack and trading duels take 0.02–10 SOL or 1–1,000 USDT; the roulette wheel takes 0.02–10 SOL per wallet.
Can you ban me, or block a game?
No. Every action is permissionless, which means anybody may send it and nobody may refuse it. There is no account to suspend, no region to block and no transaction we can veto. We could switch this website off tomorrow and the games would keep running, because they do not run here. They run on the blockchain.
Could the games be rigged without anyone noticing?
No, and that is the whole design. Your bet is locked before any card or wheel position exists. Nothing that decides a result is produced on a private server: the inputs are published on chain, the rule for combining them was fixed in advance, and anybody can re-derive any settled game and check it. A rigged result would have to disagree with arithmetic that thousands of machines already agreed on.
How much do I need to start?
The smallest bet is 0.02 SOL. Keep a little more than your stake in the wallet for network fees and for the refundable rent a new game locks up. About 0.005 SOL covers both comfortably.
The games
What you are actually playing.
How is this different from normal online blackjack?
There is no dealer. You are dealt a hand, another player is dealt their own hand from a different deck, and the better hand takes the pot. Nobody is playing a house edge against you. The house takes a flat 1% of the pot and has no hand of its own.
How does blackjack work here, step by step?
You pick a stake and lock it. Two cards appear about a second later. You hit or stand in your browser; while you play, the chain records only how many cards you hold, never which. When you stand, your table appears in the lobby. Someone matches your stake, plays their hand in the open, and the program scores both and pays out.
What are the blackjack rules exactly?
J, Q and K are 10. An Ace is 11 unless that would bust you, in which case it becomes 1. Closest to 21 wins, over 21 is a bust, and equal scores, or both busting, is a push, where both stakes are returned minus the fee. There is no 3:2 blackjack bonus: a two-card 21 is worth the same as any other 21.
How does the roulette wheel work?
One shared wheel, up to 20 wallets per round. Your chance of winning is exactly your share of the pot. Stake a fifth of it and you own a fifth of the wheel. The countdown is three minutes and starts when the second player sits down. The draw picks a single lamport out of the pot and pays whoever staked it.
What is a trading duel?
Both players get an identical $1,000 of virtual money and trade real SOL, BTC and ETH prices for a window you choose, from 5 minutes to 72 hours. No leverage, no spread, no trading fees. Whoever grows their bankroll more takes the pot.
Do both duel players have to be online at the same time?
No. You have 24 hours after someone joins to place your first trade, and that trade starts your own window. The two windows run independently, so you never wait on your opponent.
Money, fees and rent
Everything that leaves your wallet.
What does it cost to play?
A flat 1% of the pot at settlement. That is the entire house edge. There is no dealer advantage, no rake on top and no spread. A push is charged the same 1%.
What is this 'rent' my wallet mentions?
Solana charges a deposit to store an account on chain. Creating a game locks about 0.00375 SOL of it. It is not a fee: the program returns it when the finished game is closed. Your very first game also sets up two small accounts of your own, about 0.0025 SOL once, which are reused for every game after it.
What happens if nobody joins my game?
You get everything back, your whole stake and the rent, with no fee. After 24 hours a refund button appears and you can take it yourself. After 7 days it is refunded automatically. On the roulette wheel the button shows up after 1 hour instead.
What if my opponent disappears halfway through?
Every step has a timer and none of them can lock your money up. A player who goes idle is auto-stood on the cards they already hold. A player who never reveals forfeits to the one who did. A duel side that never trades loses to one that did.
Is there a minimum or maximum I can win?
The pot is twice the stake, so the most you can win in one blackjack hand or duel is 10 SOL minus the fee. On the wheel it is whatever the other players staked, up to 19 other wallets at up to 10 SOL each.
Fairness
Why the cards are not rigged, and how you can check.
How do I know the cards are not rigged?
Your bet is locked before any card exists. Only then does the program ask an outside oracle for a random value, and the deal mixes that value with the hash of a block, so neither the oracle nor any single validator decides your hand. Nobody is choosing cards after seeing money.
How does my opponent not see my hand?
Your browser makes a secret and puts only its hash on chain, before any card exists. Your deck is built from that secret combined with the oracle's value. Your opponent can read the oracle's value on chain, which is public, but never your secret, so they cannot work out your cards.
Then what stops ME hiding a losing hand?
The same commitment, pointed the other way. If your secret never surfaces, you forfeit the pot. If it does, the program re-derives your hand itself and rejects any secret that does not hash to what you committed before the cards existed. You cannot pick your cards, and you cannot disown them once you have seen them.
Where does each new card come from when I hit?
From the hash of a block about four slots in the future, a block that has not been produced yet when you press Hit. If that block never gets produced, the program walks forward to the first one that was.
Can I verify a game myself afterwards?
Yes, and you do not have to trust anything we say. Once a game has settled, every input is public on chain and you can re-derive both hands yourself. The method is written out at solanajack.com/provably-fair, and in the whitepaper. Note that this works on settled games. Card values are not on chain while a hand is still live, by design.
Who picks the prices in a trading duel?
Pyth's on-chain oracle, which publishes prices signed by the exchanges and market makers themselves, about once a minute. We also publish our own faster price tick, calculated as the median of the five biggest exchanges, and the program will only accept it if it agrees with Pyth to within a narrow band. Our tick can sharpen the price. It can never invent one.
The $JACK token
What it is, how you get it, what it pays.
What is $JACK?
The token that owns the casino's revenue. Every settled game earns it for both players by the dollar value wagered, win or lose, and staking it pays you the house edge.
How do I earn $JACK?
By playing. The program credits it from the volume you wagered, whether you won or lost, and you claim it whenever you like. 600,000 of the 1,000,000 supply can only ever enter circulation this way.
How fast is it earned, and does that change?
At the current rate, $100 of wagering earns 1 JACK. The rate halves every $30,000,000 of cumulative volume, so earning gets harder as the casino grows.
What does staking actually pay?
The casino's entire 1% fee is used to buy $JACK on the open market and hand it to stakers. The house keeps none of it. You stake JACK and receive xJACK, whose value in JACK goes up as buybacks arrive. There is no claim button: your xJACK is simply worth more than it was.
Why is unstaking slow?
Seven days, and it has several reasons. It stops people staking just before a buyback and leaving straight after. It rewards long term investors and builders, and it denies the yield to short term traders. The amount of JACK you get for your xJACK is fixed the moment you request it, and yield does not accrue during the unstaking period. If you want out immediately you can sell xJACK on the market instead, but be aware of the current market price and of the negative premium you may pay for exiting early.
Trust, risk and the awkward questions
The things a careful person asks before putting money in.
Can the team see my hidden blackjack hand?
You generate a secret in your browser and commit only its hash, before any card exists. Your deck is a shuffle of the VRF value and that secret, and the VRF lands on chain AFTER your money is sent, so nobody can fish for good decks. Everyone can see the VRF. No other player ever sees the secret. And you cannot hide behind it either: do not reveal the secret and you forfeit the pot; reveal it and the program re-derives your hand itself and rejects anything that does not hash to what you committed. You cannot pick your cards, and you cannot disown them once you have seen them.
Has any of this been audited?
Not by a third-party firm yet, and we will keep saying so until it is. What exists today is an automated test suite that runs on every change, plus batteries of adversarial tests that fire deliberately malicious transactions at the deployed program: stealing another player's payout, settling a game you are not in, redirecting the fee, minting tokens without authority. Each one has to be refused for the right reason. The code is also swept periodically by reviews organised by technique rather than by feature, with every finding handed to independent reviewers told to refute it by default.
Can you take my money, or freeze my tokens?
Your stake is held by an escrow account that only the program's rules can move; there is no withdraw function and no admin key over it. $JACK has no freeze authority at all, which cannot be added later. Nobody can freeze your tokens or print more than the fixed supply.
Can the program be changed after I have played?
Yes. The program is still upgradeable, and we hold that key. It is how new games ship and how bugs get fixed, and it is the single biggest thing you are trusting us with, so it is worth knowing rather than discovering. The intention is to hand the key to tokenholders in a way that only voting through governance can create changes, a fully decentralized model.
Can I play without using your website?
Yes, and this is the part most people miss. The website is a window onto the program, not the casino itself. Every action is a public instruction that anyone can send, so you can build your own interface or call the program directly and play exactly the same games. If this site disappeared tomorrow, the casino would carry on without it.
What happens if your servers go down?
The games keep working. Settling, spinning the wheel and paying out are all permissionless. Our keeper usually does it within seconds, but any player can do it instead, and the money moves by the program's rules either way.