Lossless lotteries seem to have found a good fit for the product market.
Just a few days after their governance token POOL was dropped, the self-proclaimed “savings game” PoolTogether easily cracked a blocked total value of 50 million US dollars and is currently over 51 million US dollars between the DAI, USDC, UNI and COMP lottery Pools.
PoolTogether aptly ‘bundles’ user funds and deposits them into decentralized funding savings logs, using the interest as prizes for randomly selected winners and returning the initial funds to buyers – creating a lossless lottery.
While the project stalled for months under a total of less than $ 10 million, growth has been explosive since the POOL governance shed on February 17th. According to a tweet by the team, the project had $ 34 million to TVL a day ago – that’s grown 33% since then.
$ 34 million deposited!
~ $ 47,000 in lossless prizes being given away this week! https://t.co/wYA1wO1NHY pic.twitter.com/lfpgu7bWZN
– PoolTogether (@PoolTogether_) February 19, 2021
PoolTogether founder Leighton Cusack references the distribution model for POOL as a partial explanation for the growth of the protocol.
“As part of the initial decentralization, 5% of the total POOL supply (500,000 tokens) was allocated to be automatically distributed to all depositors of the lossless prize pool over the next 14 weeks,” he said in an interview with Cointelegraph.
The sales program, which is conceptually similar to Liquidity Mining, is part of a larger effort to “get the token into the hands of the users”. According to Cusack, of the 1.5 million tokens that were thrown out of the air on the 17th (15% of the total supply), 600,000 were claimed.
Yet another reason for the growth is quite organic: the more depositors, the more attractive the prize pool.
“The prices are MUCH bigger than ever. Currently, protocol is on track to win over $ 60,000 in prizes over the next 7 days. So the higher prices attract more people to make deposits, ”he said.
The next step for the protocol will be to build on the promising growth. Cusack says integrating with more austerity protocols and moving to a Layer 2 to lower Ethereum’s soaring gas fees are priorities, but ultimately those decisions are now out of his hands.
“With the protocol now decentralized, it’s really up to the members of the community to drive this process forward. There is already a strong community around the protocol, and if you want to get involved, just jump into the Discord. “
