Even the small guys can win... The Story of the Smallfish.win website
Highlighting PoolTogether's Luckiest Winners
The Beginning of Smallfish.win
McOso is a PoolTogether Community Member who also happens to be a blockchain developer and a whizz with data. He had been involved with PoolTogether since version 2 in July 2019 and when he received the POOL Token Airdrop he became aware of the community aspect of PoolTogether.
As he got more involved with the community and as PoolTogether moved towards Version 3, he like many others heard the thoughts that only the “whales” - i.e. the people who deposited a lot into the different “pools” or lotteries - could win and, win big. Does the small guy i.e. someone who invests only a few hundred dollars - or less - have a chance of winning a major prize?
Well, McOso decided to find out and to see if he could put together a Leaderboard of those depositors with small amounts who went on to win big.
This is where the power of both PoolTogether and the blockchain come into being. In a real world lottery, one ticket could win the Powerball or EuroMillions jackpots but you as a consumer have no idea how many tickets that person bought. The same with loss-less lotteries in the real world like the UK Premium Bonds. Did the winner of the grand prize have a small amount put in or a lot?
With the blockchain, finding this kind of information out is possible.
McOso used something called The Graph - which is an indexing protocol for querying the likes of Ethereum - upon which PoolTogether is built.
According to the official Graph Website, “Subgraphs can be composed into a global graph of all the world's public information. This data can be transformed, organized, and shared across applications for anyone to query with just a few keystrokes.”
McOso was able to query the data and do the analysis to work out the size of the total deposit in a particular pool of the winners. So, for example, if someone won 1,330 DAI, he could also find out how much they had deposited e.g. 256 DAI - a real life example. (Don’t worry he cannot find out who you are or where you live etc!)
After all of this work, he had the back end ready and created a web app to show this.
However, this is where the feedback was not quite so positive. It was not “easy on the eyes”. Also, as PoolTogether was expanding into other pools with different tokens people could deposit, there was more work needed to do the work with The Graph.
This is where he turned to the wider community element of PoolTogether.
McOso went to the PoolTogether Grants Committee to ask for funding to allow him to do the work and hire someone to do the front end of the website. He then worked with another member of the Community - (who also designed the PoolTogether Community Substack Welcome Image) - to design the Smallfish.win website:
McOso then added in the other pools and did more work accessing data from The Graph before completing the website that you see today.
What are the take-aways from Smallfish.win?
The main thing according to McOso is, “You don’t have to deposit $100,000 to win.”
We can see from the image above that someone deposited just 73 DAI i.e. $73 and they won $11,304! In fact with that particular win, it was actually a lot more, in total $40,000 because PoolTogether also offers something called a “Loot Box” which has extra prizes on top of the weekly prizes.
You can see some of the other examples, someone deposited just $102 and won $2,669, $247 led to $11,115 and $343 led to $13,972.
Unlike normal lotteries, the PoolTogether depositors not only keep their “stake” or deposit but, they also earn interest on that. So, it is a win in many ways.
What McOso also told me he liked about PoolTogether is that it is a very easy way to onboard people into the often complex world of DeFi (Decentralized Finance) and even onboard “non-crypto” people into crypto. So, please share PoolTogether with people you know who want to start learning more about crypto.
Please visit the Smallfish.win website to see more examples of depositors with relatively modest deposits winning a great return. You could be next!
We are also getting ready for the upcoming version 4 of PoolTogether which will allow for not only much larger prizes but also more prizes and more chances to win.
Please let us know your experiences with PoolTogether and if you have ever won and how much you deposited into that pool.