Lotteries are a fundamental policy mechanism to achieve fairness in many areas. Applications include allocation of public benefits like school admission, housing, or visas, random assignments of judges to cases, voting via sortition, as well as "negative lotteries" such as secondary security screening, tax audits and randomized electing auditing. This talk will discuss the state of the art in cryptographically verifiable lotteries, including recent advances in the creation of verifiable delay functions.