The crypto community is going crazy due to the new “win-win lottery” on Ethereum.

Among fans of cryptocurrencies, a new lottery is rapidly gaining popularity. It is a DeFi application with a prize pool, which only one lucky person can pick up. At the moment, project financing has already exceeded a million dollars. The decentralized application is called PoolTogether, and companies such as IDEO CoLab Ventures, ConsenSys Labs and DTC Capital have already participated in its sponsorship.


The first “pool” was launched in June 2019. At the same time, its creators - Leighton Kusak, Brendan Asselstin and Chuck Bergeron - fully devoted themselves to working on PoolTogether only in August, and version 2.0 was launched in September.

Here's how this circuit works. A participant invests some money in PoolTogether in the form of dollar-linked stablecoins like USDC or DAI. They are recorded in the Compound Finance protocol, a company that provides blockchain loans to ordinary users. Accordingly, loans bring interest, which act as a prize fund.

Every week or day — depending on what kind of game a person chose at PoolTogether — any one lucky person takes the entire gain at once at the interest rate. Everyone else does not get anything. However, they don’t lose anything, as everyone who is not lucky to win gets their money back.

The more money a person will be fixed in the protocol, the more chances he has to hit the jackpot. If the player has very tight money, then a little later this month, the founders of PoolTogether promised to provide an opportunity to jointly redeem tickets for participation, and later share the prize equally. This, by the way, is reminiscent of conducting IEO on the Binance Launchpad platform. Read more about the bad experience with her in a separate article.

Here's how this CEO Leighton Kusak comments on this.

It seems like there will be several prizes, but the bottom line is that the loners still have a chance to collect all the money if they did not share the ticket price with anyone.

This is, in fact, the blockchain version of Premium Bonds - a popular financial project in the UK. If you believe the statistical resource MoneySavingExpert, now this lottery involves about 84 billion pounds ($ 109 billion) and 22 million people participate. Cash prizes can range from 25 pounds to a million.

However, according to Kusak, PoolTogether is more effective than Premium Bonds. At least because every dollar earns a much larger amount than in Premium Bonds. Well, because the creation and maintenance of this entire system does not cost absolutely anything: this is the beauty of blockchain technology. Anyone can feel or leave the game at any time. Moreover, the platform is based on open source code, and everyone can verify its fairness.

The PoolTogether team has already mastered some of the investors' money that the project received in December.

• They helped pay for the work of security specialists, and also went to pay enthusiasts who participated in the bug search program.
• Part of the money went to Sponsored Dai, a specialized fund that allows the pool to charge a large interest rate. Now, according to the founders, the fund has about 250 thousand dollars.
• The third - and perhaps the most important expense item - is the fee to keep the game free. You can participate in it absolutely for free, and the company does not earn anything from this.

Kusak notes an important detail.

Since the launch of the second version of the protocol in September last year, we have not taken a penny from users.

Perhaps, if you evaluate the long-term prospects, then PoolTogether will someday consider ways to monetize the project. In the meantime, users can only hope for a jackpot.