Executive Summary
PoolTogether is a no-loss audited savings lottery, powered by blockchain technology. Users can purchase digital tickets by depositing DAI, a Ethereum-based stablecoin, into the lottery pool. For every 1 DAI you deposit, you get one ticket. All the DAI is pooled together and lent to the Compound money market protocol to earn interest. Each week, one ticket is drawn at random and the interest accrued on the DAI pool for that week is awarded to the winner. The best part is that, win or lose, your ticket can be withdrawn and redeemed for the original 1 DAI at any time. Imagine playing the Powerball lotto but your tickets are still valid every week, and you can refund them for full price when you’re done playing. That’s PoolTogether!
Challenges
A no-loss lottery is a new paradigm for a savings application within the decentralized finance category (DeFi), and has the potential to disrupt the lottery industry. This industry generates about $80 billion in sales each year in the U.S. alone. In order to reach this potential, PoolTogether needs to provide a low-friction onboarding experience for new users, and infrastructure that can scale.
Reliable Infrastructure, Made to Scale
Using Infura as their node service provider, PoolTogether was able to shift the burden of infrastructure away from their team so they could instead focus on building new features and optimizing their novel protocol design. PoolTogether V3 has witnessed impressive growth and (as of April 2021) holds over $202 million in total value locked across four different asset pools, with over 6,000 consistent weekly lottery players, and over $149K of no loss prizes weekly!
We look forward to continuing to power PoolTogether as they expand their unique Web3 application, bolstering the gamification and adoption of blockchain-based applications at large.