Which pick sellers prove a pick came before the game

A pick seller can prove a pick existed before the game, and few do. The usual method is a cryptographic hash: the seller publishes a fingerprint of the pick before kick-off and reveals the pick afterwards, so anybody can check that the two match.

How strong each method is

• A screenshot or a post on the seller's own site. Weak. Both can be made or edited later.
• A public post with a platform timestamp. Better, though a post that lost can be deleted.
• A hash published before the game. Strong against changing a pick. On its own, it relies on the seller's clock.
• A hash signed by an outside timestamp authority. Stronger, because somebody who is not the seller signs the time, and only ever sees the hash.
• A full ledger you can download. This lets you check every row at once, and lets you notice a row that goes missing.

Sellers that describe doing this

From each service's own pages on 2026-11-06. We have not audited any of them, and the list is not complete.

• FootballEdge seals batches of picks before kick-off, with FreeTSA and DigiCert timestamps and Bitcoin-anchored proofs.
• TiltDataLabs commits picks to a public repository and a transparency log, and submits them to OpenTimestamps.
• TACTIX keeps an append-only, SHA-256 hash-chained ledger.
• PeoplesPicks keeps an append-only, hash-chained ledger.
• BetsBeats, this site, has sealed each main pick with SHA-256 and a secret salt before kick-off since 2026-08-28, and reveals both after the day settles. The 89 days before that have no hash. New picks carry FreeTSA and DigiCert timestamps. The whole settled archive is one JSON file.

What none of this proves

Proof of timing is not proof of quality. A pick sealed in advance can still lose, and a seller can still leave a day out before publishing anything. What a hash cannot show goes through the gaps, and the verification page lets you check a BetsBeats pick in your own browser.