Quanta claims to have created the first legal lottery on the blockchain globally.
Quanta is a blockchain based crypto gaming platform. While it has been in development since 2015, it is only now coming out of a beta in February 2018. The first major use case is an online lottery system. Unique Selling Proposition is that is the first legal gaming platform based on the blockchain. Like many other gambling and gaming platforms involving money and an element of chance, they are incorporated in the Isle of Man.
From a pure technological perspective, Quanta is interesting because it takes the applicability of Ethereum a step further than just an ERC-20 / ERC-223 standards of creating tokens. They have created RANDAO which is basically an open source random number generator that allows open validation. A breath of fresh air compared to 99% of the ICOs out there.
The whitepaper claims that it is a decentralized gaming system. However, upon closer examination, one can see that this is not absolutely true. There are many centralization points of the organization and system. The legal entity of the company itself. Besides that, that not all of the system is actually on the decentralized blockchain.
The presentation slide deck itself had some interesting nuggets but quite apparently missing from the website. I would suggest that Quanta make available the slide deck or update the whitepaper to include diagrams and details in the slides.
In fact, the only part that is really on the blockchain is the RANDAO. Actual distribution of winnings are still done traditionally with human intervention. Besides that, the requirements of KYC (Know Your Customer identification typically required by financial institutions) goes up to level KYC3; i.e. highest level? So one can forget about anonymity. The highest level of KYC and requirement to reveal your cryptocurrency addresses means that the government and financial institutions will have complete visibility of your transactions. If you are all for privacy, you should completely avoid this service. Satoshi-dice it is not.
Upon closer inspection of the code on githubit is apparent that there has not been much open source development. All the code online was posted once 6 to 7 months ago and never been updated since.
At the very least though, it is a good experiment in mixing the strengths of blockchain (security, openness) and confidence and knowledge of a more traditional client-server architecture.