A crypto-powered lottery has helped one lucky winner turn $74 into just shy of $40,000.
PoolTogether doesn’t cost money—in a sense—to play; instead, you enter it by depositing cryptocurrencycryptocurrency tokens. It uses those tokens to generate a yield, and it’s this yield that is put into the lottery and shared out among those who participate. So, it’s a matter of perspective: You’re not losing anything by participating, although you are missing out on some yield that you otherwise might have gained.
On March 14, 2020, this particular user put $74 worth of the DAI cryptocurrency—a decentralizeddecentralized stablecoin pegged to the US dollar—into one of the pools. It sat there, generating a very small amount of yield, which was being put into the lottery.
On April 9, the user struck lucky, winning the lion’s share of the $33,100 prize (made up of DAI) and the $32,700 loot box, which comprises four tokens including Compound and STAKE. There were 4,754 players in the lottery. In total, they won $39,600.
.@PoolTogether_ is front-page-news-material in the making and, consequently, has the potential to be major on-boarding platform into DeFi at large
Because the amounts involved were so small, the user had a 1 in 289,812 chance of winning the Grand Prize (the largest reward on offer). In contrast, one of the runners up had more than $10 million in DAI with a 1 in 2.48 chance of winning.
While the money is substantial, the user already has a fair chunk of cryptocurrency. According to Etherscan, they already have $14,600 of Ethereum (ETH) in their wallet, with their PoolTogether winnings bringing their holdings of Ethereum-based tokens up to $195,000.
Launched in June 2019, PoolTogether has grown considerably over the past year or so. It now has at least $170 million locked up in its various pools, the majority in its DAI and USDC pools. According to crypto research unit Messari, PoolTogether has paid out $750 million in prizes since it began. While most of that will go to the whales who’ve deposited large funds to the platform, every so often a smaller holder can strike it lucky.
Daily Debrief Newsletter
Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
Crypto's best minds are heading east, and it's gaining at a pace that other regions are finding hard to catch up to.
Asia was responsible for 32% of global crypto developer activity in 2024, according to a report from venture firm Electric Capital. The firm recently published its comprehensive annual report, analyzing over 900 million code commits across the crypto industry.
The transformation represents a nearly threefold increase from Asia's 12% share in 2015, while North America's position de...
Google's announcement of its breakthrough Willow quantum processor has reignited debates about crypto security, with some observers suggesting quantum computers could break Bitcoin's encryption.
The tech giant claims its new quantum computing chip can complete certain calculations in five minutes, which would take traditional supercomputers an impractical amount of time to process.
Quantum computing is a new type of computing that uses the strange properties of quantum physics, where small part...
Dimo, a platform for developers to build apps and enable car drivers to monetize their data, is migrating between Ethereum scaling networks, the developers exclusively told Decrypt—from Polygon to Coinbase’s Base. Co-founder Rob Solomon believes the move opens doors for valuable partnerships ahead.
The project is a “global API layer for cars” that is aiming to make every car on earth smart and programmable. This could manifest, the company says, in a future full of AI car mechanics and smart par...