We’re happy to announce PoolTogether has raised $1 million to accelerate our mission of empowering financial health. This round has been led by IDEO CoLab Ventures with participation from ConsenSys Labs and DTC Capital. It builds upon earlier funding from the MakerDAO Grant Program.

Prize Linked Savings (PLS) is an underdeveloped financial primitive on the blockchain. PLS products are a popular and effective method of increasing healthy financial behavior — in the UK alone over $100 Billion is currently saved in PLS products¹. Building a PLS protocol on Ethereum improves on traditional options by increasing efficiency, broadening access, and improving trust.

The funding has enabled several immediate enhancements to both the PoolTogether protocol and consumer application:

1. Security

Security is always our top priority. This investment has enabled us to hire some of the best security auditors in the world² and also dramatically increase our payouts for any bugs³.

2. Larger Prizes

A portion of the funding has been added to the “Sponsored Dai” in the PoolTogether Protocol. This Dai contributes interest to the prize but is NOT eligible to win. This improves the expected value from PoolTogether⁴, the weekly Dai pool currently has ~$250,000 sponsored Dai.

3. Zero Fees

Initially, PoolTogether planned to support operations with a 10% fee on the interest accrued. This fundraise has enabled us to move forward without this fee. To be clear PoolTogether does not take any fees of any type.

Next Steps

We believe prize linked savings will be the entry point for millions of new DeFi users. We’re committed to making that a reality by developing the PoolTogether Protocol to be permissionless, composable, and decentralized.

You can try out the Prize Linked Savings protocol right now at PoolTogether.com.