[Review] [GF: Phase 1] PoolTogether

In Latin America PoolTogether is a very popular protocol and used by users:

That is really encouraging to hear! Please reach out to me if you have any ideas on how we can continue to grow protocol usage in Latin America!

I have a question, could you please detail how you are going to manage these funds, will they be linked to PoolTogether governance or will they be selected by the team?

Good question! This grant request is ultimately for PoolTogether Inc, the company. So at the end of the day we (meaning the company) will be in charge of managing their distribution.

However, I do anticipate that process will have a lot of input from the broader PoolTogether community.

Let me know if you have any other thoughts or questions!

Looks good to be. I have good user experience with PoolTogether

2 Likes

Hey @Leighton;

This would accompany the $OP rewards; Or is it an action that they normally perform even if the grant is not received?

Would you help me to clearly understand where these coincentivities come from and what their distribution policy is like?

1 Like

Hey, not Leighton but a PT Community member :slight_smile:
The USDC incentives come from the PT treasury (https://info.pooltogether.com/), the network APR currently is 3.42%, that means a 1000$ depositor wins on average 34$ and that is better than what he would get on Aave directly!
The current prize distribution on Optimism is:
1 x 1000$
32 x 20$
and 512 x 5$, per day!
We especially want to reward small depositors, that‘s why there are so many small prizes and there is a prize cap of 1 prize per wallet.

Hey @Lonser; thanks for answering

But my doubts are not clear to me;
What is your treasury fund distribution policy?
I understood that these funds are sent today, right? that is, regardless of the $OP grant

1 Like

I am one of the Synthetix Ambassadors, & a member of the Defi Shadow Committee.

I am an Optimism delegate [Delegate Commitments - #65 by mastermojo ] with sufficient voting power, and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

2 Likes

Hey, great question!

The $OP factors in and without the $OP prizes would be reduced significantly. The finance team that sets the prize distribution has committed to keeping the average USDC yield rate at least 50% higher than Aave USDC yield assuming the $OP incentives stay. This has been based on the assumption of the last couple of months of having $OP incentives.

I can’t speak to exactly how that would change if the $OP incentives did not stay but it would certainly be less.

I can say overall, the whole PoolTogether community sees the $OP incentives as a super important and limited window to maximize growth.

I’m a delegate with enough voting power Delegate Commitments - #136 by jackanorak and i think this is ready for a vote

1 Like

Thanks for the concise proposal.

It’s good to see your alignment with Optimism, initial growth on Optimism & reaching set goals.

We believe that easy-to-use products with product market fit such as Pooltogether can onboard a significant amount of real users & liquidity - even though yield hunters may dominate currently.

Consequently, it’s also reasonable to phase out OP rewards over time after a kickstarting period to ultimately achieve sustainable growth on Optimism :+1:

The core KPIs are also very clear and make sense - not 100% sure about the necessity of new frontends / builder incentives in the near-term for a project that can, in our opinion, contribute most to the success of Optimism with user/liquidity onboarding in the near-term.

That said, we also see potential in future collaborations on specific co-marketing campaigns, user onboarding funnels, better UX etc.

3 Likes

Thanks for your feedback! Let me know if you have any additional questions!

As we get closer to the voting period, I’d like to highlight the OP Rewards part of this Dune Dashboard.
As a background: The current rewards on PoolTogether accrue in real time and are claimable every Tuesday for the previous week, based on a users TWAB.

So far, more than 5,400 unique wallets have claimed the OP rewards on PoolTogether, while we can still see several hundred new claimers every week.

At the time of writing, 347,500 OP tokens are available for claiming. Out of these, almost 300,000 were claimed already.

The increase in claims in week five and ten suggest that some users wait for the end of a distribution period to claim the full amount at once. The third distribution period will end on November 15th. I expect a similar increase in claims the week after that.

Overall this verifies the thesis that $OP distributed via PoolTogether goes to a wide set of users and not just to a few whales. The marketing around the incentives continues to be effective, attracting new users and creating awareness.

While these rewards go out to many new Optimism users, we make sure to keep educating them about their rights in token house governance. The claim process in the PoolTogether app includes a prompt to delegate your $OP:

Happy to discuss any left uncertainties or doubts before the voting period starts. :slight_smile:

3 Likes

@Leighton
Very clear proposal; the statistics are specific, and I am enthusiastic about the results achieved; PT is a great project for Optimism, its track record and simplicity is impeccable

As some members have already commented, I don’t agree with the grant to projects, much less to user interfaces; would you be willing to change this?

@Netrim advice, to diversify the source of income (new alliances) seems key to the joint and organic growth of the ecosystem

I would like to echo this as well. PT has clear use case, last distribution plan and its impact is clearly visible, both from TVL and user activity side.
Not that I am against better UI but in given the market condition, shouldn’t we focus more towards user incentives.

Netrim warned me that they should no longer change the proposal, it was approved as such, I did not notice this; With which my advice is useless in this instance, would you be willing to change this for the next cycle? @Leighton

Thanks for the feedback!

We’ve carefully timed this proposal to avoid an ending of the deposit incentives. Right now, if this current vote fails then $OP rewards for PoolTogether will end on November 15th (two weeks from today).

Obviously we could re-start them but I think ending and then re-starting would lead to a big loss in momentum and diminish the overall effectiveness that we see.

We are happy to continue to work collaboratively on how to best leverage 170k OP allocated for yield source integrations and alternative interfaces. Yield source integrations will be very important as it will improve the overall Optimism ecosystem. As an example of alternative interfaces, here is one thing that Pool Grants recently funded. This wouldn’t something funded using this grant but we do believe that ideas like this could help cement a larger community on Optimism and attract more people to try it out.

fwiw i’m in favor of advancing the proposal as is, tho couple q’s

there’s an enormous amount of precedent in funding integrations so i’m not at all averse to encouraging more composability within the system. wanted to know, though – what’s the process of integration look like, and how’s the dev burden distributed between you and the partner protocol? has there been friction in getting new yield sources onboarded?

i’d also comment that better UX in a world with generally bush-league interfaces is for my money a better source of user onboarding than any small incentive. paired with user incentives (which have been uniquely effective in PoolTogether’s hands – the analysis last week showed that, broadly speaking, their efficacy has been mixed at best), I’d say that’s good, broad coverage for growth.

That said, though, hoping to get a brief sense of finances and why a grant at this stage would catalyze better UX – are you unable to move this forward otherwise?

wanted to know, though – what’s the process of integration look like, and how’s the dev burden distributed between you and the partner protocol? has there been friction in getting new yield sources onboarded?

Good question! Over the years we’ve tried many different approaches, we’ve done them internally, we’ve bountied them and then yield source teams have done them. Our best outcomes have been working directly with yield source teams to get them done. We also always audit them. So generally we’ve tried to either get the yield source team to do them for free and we pay for the audit or provide some sort of grant to the yield source team
 that would be the idea here.

That said, though, hoping to get a brief sense of finances and why a grant at this stage would catalyze better UX – are you unable to move this forward otherwise?

The PoolTogether Inc team is a total 5 people (was 4 people until yesterday when we added Ncookie). We have zero designers on our team and we only have one front-end. So internally, we are highly limited in terms of what we can do UI wise.

I’ve always felt like there is a big need for a UI that connects to the protocol but focuses specifically on people who have never used a dapp before (have a Cex account but never used DeFi). So that’s something specifically I’d love to see. We’ve also had a lot of good work done on instrumentation, things like prize notification bots, prize odds calculators, things along those lines.

Overall, these integrations and UIs are things that will move a lot slower but I thought having some allocation for them would be good as a longer term play rather than incentive focused stuff.

I love this proposal and PoolTogether is highly trusted in the space. But we asked every other proposal to either state exactly how teams/projects reserves will be distributed or to take it out of the proposal I feel I have to ask the same here.

Don’t get me wrong I know 100% you will use this for new PoolTogether UIs. But if you can specify how that 20% distribution will be that would be perfect.

The same goes for the 10%.

I rather have to approve a second proposal asking for UIs core features individually than leave this 30% to the team will.

Again, I trust the PoolTogether team 100% but I want to keep the same conditions for all teams even if they earned my trust. thank you!

Thanks for the input and kind words!

Could you clarify this for me?

we asked every other proposal to either state exactly how teams/projects reserves will be distributed

What level of detail do you need beyond what is already shared? Do you need to know exactly who would be getting the grants?

I rather have to approve a second proposal asking for UIs core features individually than leave this 30% to the team will.

My understanding (via @Netrim) is at this stage, we can’t change the proposal. Is that correct? If it is possible to adjust the current proposal before voting I would do so.

You can change the proposal. Tag your approvers to reafirm their position.

“Well if you say 10k Op will go to this team for this UIs” that would be awesome. But if you have the UIs features in mind and you don’t have the teams at least specify those features and approximate distributions.

“Feature 1 does this and we will allocate approx 10k OP”

Sounds logical or is it too much work? I’m trying to figure out how to approve this I’m very fond of developer grants.