Ethfinance community driven DAI Pod

Mkkoll
5 min readJun 18, 2021

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- PoolTogether & Ethfinance DAI Pod update -

Good day r/ethfinance!

I am announcing the creation and launch of our glorious community driven /r/ethfinance PoolTogether DAI Pod at ethfinance.win site! 🐟

So pretty!

This is, according to PoolTogether devs, the first ever community Pod created outside the 2 official PoolTogether Inc DAI and USDC pods. This is NOT an official ethfinance Pod and not endorsed by any mods of any sort, but is simply created as a hobby project by 2 enthusiasts and users of ethfinance; myself and sharingnotes#5182 of PoolTogether discord. We are excited to provide a community Pod which has long been an aspiration of many in our community. Its usage and hopefully eventually ‘whale status’ is now in your hands.

By rallying around a single Pod, ratio-gang + pod-gang can collectively increase our overall chances to win and defeat the whales! 🐳 🍴

You can find out more about Pods here

- How it works & benefits of a Pod?

  • 💪 As pod entrants, we get to combine the strength of all our deposits into a sole contract or ‘Pod’. Many little fish 🐟 become a big fish 🐋
  • 🤖 The PoolTogether protocol treats this contract as a single ‘address’ or ‘player’ within a Pool. If any ticket of the Pod is drawn by the PT protocol, winnings are awarded to the entire Pod and users can claim proportional to their stake within the Pod.
  • ⛽ Gas costs to join a Pod are about ⅓ as expensive as entering a Pool the traditional way. This is because the BATCH command efficiently combines all Pod entrants’ deposits into Compound in a single transaction, instead of each user doing the expensive Compound transaction themselves. (See the tutorial linked below for info about BATCH and more)

The DAI Pool has 3 weekly winners and is drawn at 19:05 UTC Fridays. The prize is split to 3 winners. Grand prize + 2 runners up. All winners get 1/3 of the prize pot interest accrued but the Grand prize winner also receives the Loot Box. In the Loot Box is anything from NFTs to farmed tokens from the Yield Source. In this case COMP from Compound. The hope here is that our Pod is one of the 3 winners and ideally the grand prize winner 💰🤑 The DAI pool currently has +$50 million DAI deposits earning prizes and a +7% APR in POOL drip rewards.

- How was the Pod contract created and how do i know this is legit? — 🤨

The Pod contract was created by the official PodFactory contract created by the PoolTogether Inc team, so by extension, carries the same contract security as the original Pods. Let me restate that because its the main source of info you need to know I didn’t write my own contract to rugpull your funds from a custom contract. This pod carries identical contract code to the official PoolTogether Pod contracts as it came from the same place. The PodFactory. You can confirm the contract came from the official PodFactory contract with this transaction. This is the very same contract that formed the official USDC and DAI pod contracts for PoolTogether Inc. Note the previous transactions that form the basis of the USDC and DAI pods.

- What is the official Pod contract address? -

Our Ethfinance Pod contract is 0x09accc89e3599137c83fb87acb9443a15c4bd268

Note the pod contract address is the same as the address in the url of the Player page on app.PoolTogether
I have also requested the PoolTogether Inc devs to give the Pod a unique name for its address in the Players list on PoolTogether. ‘🐳 /r/ethfinance Pod Users’

See the Pod represented as a ‘player’ in the pool on app.pooltogether!

- What happens if your community made and hosted front-end goes down? — 🔥😫

Should the front-end UI at ethfinance.win ever go down, I have created a tutorial on how to manually interact with the Etherscan pod contract’s write interface. This should hopefully never be necessary, but is provided to give you peace of mind that a means to enter & exit the pod is always available via manual contract interaction. The tutorial also contains more info on the inner workings of a Pod so is recommended further reading.

There is a ‘Pod Upkeep’ page that will allow you to activate any of the permissionless contract interactions too.

- Caveats

Please be aware of the following caveats & when depositing to the ethfinance DAI Pod.

  • The BATCH command needs to be run to push deposited DAI funds into the DAI Pool. This is a permissionless command and can be run by any user but I will run it myself at least once a week at or around Friday 18:00 UTC. This is approx 1 hour before the DAI Prize Pool is drawn. This will ensure any deposits from the week before will be in the live Pool for the next week but until the BATCH command is run, your DAI deposit wont be live in the Pool yet.
  • As creator of the Pod, I own the private keys for the PodManager. The PodManager CANNOT arbitrarily remove funds from the Pod, but is responsible for special actions such as distributing ERC721’s (Think NFTs that cannot be distributed to all pod holders)
  • Should the Pod win any NFTs, the ethfinance community can decide how we distribute. Either by competitions in r/ethfinance or liquidating on opensea. Another idea i had was to liquidate and donate to a gitcoin grant of community choice.
  • The contract tracks all POOL reward APY due to each pDAI token holder, but the DROP command needs to be run first to distribute. Again, this is a permissionless command that any user can run themselves on the contract.
  • There is an internal ‘early exit fee’ that will be charged on your deposit up to a max of 1% of the original deposit if you withdraw within 10 days, winding down to 0% the closer you get to the exit window. This is to prevent users ‘gaming’ the prizepool by depositing right before the draw and exiting right after. After the cooldown period has passed, you can safely withdraw your funds without any losses. The ethfinance.win ‘withdraw’ UI calculates this fee and will display what you will be charged if you attempt to withdraw early.
  • As is the advice with any smart contract, use at your own risk and only commit funds you are willing to lose. i.e please dont yolo degen into a lottery game with your life savings.

If you have any further questions or issues with the Pod or Pod UI, please dont hesitate to get directly in touch with me, u/mkkoll on reddit. I am excited for our Pod and want it to be a roaring success and a non-degen, fun focal point for our community to rally around! 😄

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