In brief

  • PoolTogether just added Pods, a way for users to share their chances of winning the no-loss lottery and fairly split the rewards.
  • Pods collect lottery tickets from multiple users and if one is selected to win, all users in the Pod are paid out proportionally.
  • PoolTogether plans to add user generated Pods to give users more choices to adjust their odds.

PoolTogether, the prize-linked savings account built on Ethereum, today announced a new feature: a way to increase the odds of winning its “no-loss” crypto lottery.

PoolTogether users can now combine their lottery tickets, purchased with DAI or USDC stablecoins, into Pods. The Pods allow users to combine their tickets into a secondary basket. If the winning ticket is part of a Pod, the prize money is split proportionally among participantsthe more tickets an individual submits to a Pod, the greater his or her piece of the reward will be.

The way the lottery itself works is pretty simple: Users deposit stablecoins in exchange for lottery tickets on a one-to-one basis. Those coins are then sent to Compound, a decentralized money market that sets interest rates based on supply and demand to generate interest. Earned interest is taken out of Compound at regular intervals each week or each day, depending on the lottery, and sent to the randomly selected winning ticket holder.

So why no loss? PoolTogether lets its users withdraw their deposits at any time, and only earned interest is paid as lottery rewards. This keeps the “no-loss” promise while incentivizing users to save money within PoolTogether to increase their chances of winning. And these Pods might now help sweeten the pot.

“Pods enable users to pick what chance they want to win a prize,” PoolTogether CEO Leighton Cusack explained in an interview with Decrypt. “By joining a Pod the user has a much higher chance of winning, but the prize is smaller because they are splitting it,” he said.

“If they want to have a larger prize they can keep their tickets and not join a Pod, so Pods enable players to choose if they want a big prize with a low chance or a smaller prize with a high chance.”

The Pods code is open source and has been reviewed by security audits firm OpenZeppelin. At launch, only one Pod is available, but PoolTogether indicated in an earlier blog post that the ability to create user generated Pods will be added in the future.

To date, PoolTogether has paid out more than $20,000 to lottery winners.

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