PoolTogether DeFi App Announces $1M Investment After No-Loss Lottery Payout Tops $1K

One lucky DAI holder won over $1,400 on PoolTogether Friday, reaching a new order of magnitude in prize payouts for risk-averse gamblers.

PoolTogether players sacrifice interest they could have earned on holdings of the stablecoin DAI in exchange for a shot at winning the interest of everyone else in the pool.

PoolTogether is attractive to savers for two reasons: because they don't put their principal at risk and because a large portion of the pool is sponsored.

In short, PoolTogether offers a simple way to gamify savings and make it slightly more fun, though there is the very real risk of never winning and merely losing out on the all-but-guaranteed yield from placing your DAI in Compound directly.

"We initially became interested in PoolTogether because we found the concept of a global Prized Linked Savings protocol to be both highly compelling as well as something that is uniquely enabled by blockchain technology," Dan Elitzer, an investor at IDEO CoLab Ventures, told CoinDesk.

PoolTogether has been experiencing strong growth since its first pool, though it did see a hiccup as MakerDAO made the switch to multi-collateral DAI last November.

PoolTogether recently updated its business model so that it no longer holds 10 percent of each winning pool, as we previously reported.

"PoolTogether is a unique company that enables entrenched behavior using new crypto primitives and provides a foundation for the emergence of new behavior as a result," Min Teo, an investment partner at ConsenSys Labs, told CoinDesk via a spokesperson.

With its success so far with DAI, PoolTogether is bringing a new product onto the market: a daily prize powered by USDC, the fiat-backed stablecoin created by Circle and Coinbase.

To incentivize players, PoolTogether will seed the new pool with $100,000 worth of USDC that is not eligible for winning.