PoolTogether – a no-loss savings game built on Ethereum – announced the release of Pods earlier this week.

1/ Introducing Pods – a new way to win more prizes while saving. 🏆 Pods allow PoolTogether players to link their tickets together. If any ticket in the pod wins, the prize is split proportionally. Now you can win a prize for saving money even if you only have a few dollars! pic.twitter.com/PwsV2IaEgq — PoolTogether (@PoolTogether_) April 22, 2020

For those unfamiliar, PoolTogether allows anyone to deposit DAI or USDC into a pool that collects interest through Compound cTokens. Every week, the accumulated interest of the entire pool is paid out to one lucky contributor as a lump prize. With the release of Pods, the “winner” can now be a collection of different users instead of one single individual.

The advent of Pods is exciting as it allows PoolTogether players to link their tickets and increase their overall chances of winning. If any ticket in the pod wins, the prize is split proportionally to everyone in the group based on the amount they contributed. While the payout per person will be less than single tickets, the increase in odds of winning creates an incentive for users to band together. Best of all, joining a pod does not exclude users from getting tickets for the main pool. Users can allocate however many tickets to a pod that they’d like while still keeping some moonshot tickets for themselves on the side!

The pods code is open source and has been audited by OpenZeppelin. Going forward, the PoolTogether team plans to add tools for anyone to easily create their own pod.

Why Does This Matter?

At the time being, DeFi is not easy for the average person to get into. Although the interest rates have historically exceeded that of legacy banks, it’s often not worth the risk and learning required to get started. PoolTogether created the idea of a no-loss lottery and has effectively gamified the process of earning interest on Compound. While many people would opt for constant interest generation on their funds, others will prefer to take their chances every week at a much larger payout.

Adding pods to the mix increases incentives for people to start using PoolTogether and protects from the odds getting out of hand as the project grows. Once people start creating their own pods and sharing them with friends, it creates a social aspect to the savings game that will reward collaboration to increase the odds of winning.

!!! Pods (improved odds) + Sponsored Funds (higher savings rate) just turned @PoolTogether_ into a first-class alpha-generating money-saving prize-winning #DeFi robot 🤖 https://t.co/0DTcfmYM27 — Spencer Noon (@spencernoon) April 25, 2020

Institutional players are starting to take notice of the benefits of PoolTogether as well. In early April, Coinbase announced that they deposited $100k USDC as a pool sponsor through their USDC Bootstrap Fund. Pool sponsors’ donations increase the total interest earned but do not receive tickets eligible to win. As of writing, there is over $300k of sponsor money in the pool.

Check out PoolTogether and join your first pod today at https://app.pooltogether.com/!