Your odds of winning this crypto no-loss lottery just got better

PoolTogether, the prize-linked savings account built on EthereumEthereum, 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 participants—the 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 stablecoinsstablecoins 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.

This new cryptocurrency lottery is impossible to lose

Anyone who’s ever bought a lottery ticket knows the feeling: the odds are so slim, just breaking even is a small victory in itself. Now, a new cryptocurrency-based game of chance wants to help cautious risk takers feel like a winner each and every time. PoolTogether, which launched on Monday, is a “no-loss” lottery built on Ethereum. Players buy tickets in Dai, an Ethereum-backed stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, and the funds are pooled together in a smart contract—the bigger the pool, the...

“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.