PoolTogether, a no-loss and lottery-like savings game on Ethereum that players can withdraw their funds from at any time, has rolled out a new feature that will make the dApp that much more user-friendly.
On Wednesday, April 22nd, the PoolTogether team announced “Pods,” which will allow players to pool their tickets in groups atop the game’s main weekly Dai prize pool.
Per this design when a pod scores a winning ticket the ensuing prize will be split automatically and proportionally among the members of that pod, PoolTogether CEO Leighton Cusack explained in the announcement post:
“For example, if you put 100 tickets into a pod which has a total of 1,000 tickets you will receive 10% of any prize won by any of the 1,000 tickets. Being in a pod gives you a higher chance to win a smaller portion of a prize.”
In this sense, pods are not totally unlike traditional lottery pools often used by friends, families, and co-workers. The fundamental difference is PoolTogether’s pods will be on-chain and live completely on Ethereum as opposed to being settled manually by grouping paper tickets. On PoolTogether, then, even strangers can link their tickets together.
Cusack went on to say the dApp’s players will be able to easily manage how they play the main pool and pods:
“You can have tickets in a pod and also have solo tickets in the pool at the same time. You can also swap tickets between the pool and a pod whenever you desire.”
For those who do get lucky, winnings will be instantly converted to more PoolTogether tickets. The weekly prize tickets are worth 1 Dai each and can be withdrawn whenever.
How Will the Pod Ecosystem Shape Up?
For now, PoolTogether has only launched one flagship pod to get things rolling, though more are coming in short order.
“To get started, there is only one pod available, in the future we will launch a simple way for anyone to create their own pod,” Cusack said.
This means in the foreseeable future a range of different-sized pods will likely be in operation. How exactly this range comes to be remains to be seen. Of course, one can’t rule out a single mega-pod forming at some point that encompasses all PoolTogether players.
Such a mega-pod may be statistically improbable, but it would have interesting implications. “[I]f all tickets were transferred to the pod everyone would receive a higher [annual percentage rate] than Compound paid out weekly,” the PoolTogether team explained on Twitter.
PoolTogether on the Rise
Ethereum’s first hit savings game has had a good year so far, which kicked off with PoolTogether notching its first 1,500 unique users back in January.
One month later, the dApp’s lean team announced it had raised just over $1 million USD in funding from the likes of firms like IDEO CoLab Ventures, ConsenSys Labs, and DTC Capital.
“We believe prize linked savings will be the entry point for millions of new DeFi users,” Cusack said at the time.
Then one of the game’s biggest shows of support yet came earlier this month U.S. cryptocurrency exchange giant Coinbase revealed it was injecting 100,000 USDC from its USDC Bootstrap Fund into PoolTogether’s daily USDC prize pool.
“We look for teams who build innovative products, leverage USDC, and effectively manage risks,” Coinbase said.
The direct support and stamp of approval from one of the cryptoeconomy’s most influential firms is no small matter and bodes well for PoolTogether’s future.
For the team and their dApp to have come this far in such a short period of time, imagine what they can accomplish in the years ahead. PoolTogether is an early star for Ethereum and has a chance to help bring in lots of new crypto users going forward.
