Winner of $1.08BN Powerball jackpot is finally revealed - and the good news is there's another massive prize up for grabs tonight

The mysterious winner of last summer's Powerball jackpot worth $1.08 billion was finally revealed on Friday.

Yanira Alvarez has been identified as the lucky winner after purchasing the ticket at Las Palmitas Mini Market, a tiny convenience store in downtown Los Angeles.

Her win in July marked the end of a 39-draw jackpot run for Powerball and the first of two back-to-back billion-dollar winning tickets sold in California, lottery officials said.

The lucky lady opted for the one-time lump sum of $558.1 million instead of the $1.08 billion paid out in yearly increments.

The next Powerball draw is scheduled for Saturday evening, with an estimated jackpot of $935 million or a cash value of $452.3 million, as a result of nobody winning the main prize for 37 consecutive drawings.

Alvarez's prize was the third largest in the history of the game at the time of the drawing, but it's now sits in fourth place after Theodorus Struyck, another California resident, won the $1.75 billion jackpot last October. 

Struyck came forward earlier this month as the representative of a group of winners who purchased the ticket at Midway Market & Liquor in Frazier Park, about an hour's drive from Los Angeles. 

'Announcing big wins like this gives all of our players the chance to hope and dream that they could be next,' said California Lottery Director Harjinder K. Shergill Chima in a press release.  

DailyMail.com revealed last year that Las Palmitas Mini Market, the market where the billion-dollar ticket was sold, sits just blocks from the homeless encampments of Skid Row in LA. 

Store owner Nabor Herrera, who received a $1 million bonus for just selling the ticket, said he did not realize he'd sold the winning ticket until he arrived for work early Thursday and saw cameras camped out in front of the shop. 

'I tell you, it's a surprise for me, I didn't know what it is -- filming or what,' the father of four told KTLA-TV.

Herrera, who has owned the store for seven years, said he'd sold lots of Powerball tickets in recent days, mostly to locals from the neighborhood.

The shopkeeper said he planned to use his $1 million seller bonus to expand his business, and perhaps take his family on a 'one week' vacation to Cabo San Lucas in Mexico. 

The store also located just 13 miles from the convenience store where Powerball winner Edwin Castro purchased his ticket for November's $2.04 billion jackpot -- the largest in US history. 

Powerball is played in 45 states, as well as Washington DC, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. 

Lottery jackpots have been growing larger in recent years, after changes that made the odds longer and winning more difficult.

In 2015, the Powerball lottery lengthened the odds of winning from 1 in 175.2 million to 1 in 292.2 million. 

Mega Millions followed two years later, lengthened the odds of winning the top prize from 1 in 258.9 million to 1 in 302.6 million.

The largest lottery payout in US history was a whopping $2.04billion Powerball jackpot that hit on November 8, 2022, with the winning ticket sold in California. 

The largest Mega Millions jackpot was $1.537billion won by an anonymous player in South Carolina on October 23, 2018.

The rich $1billion Powerball payout, and a separate Mega Millions jackpot sitting at a whopping $720million, spurred a frenzy of ticket sales at convenience stores and gas stations across the country on Wednesday.

It is only the fifth time the jackpots of both drawings have exceeded $500million at the same time, and the combined payout of $1.72billion is the fifth-largest in history, according to data provided to DailyMail.com by Lottery Critic.