How I Got Involved with the PoolTogether Community in 2021
An Interview with Thumbs Up Finance - a Writer Turned PT Community Member
Hello,
Welcome to the end of October! Version 4 of PoolTogether continues to mint new winners every single day. People who had not won in a long time or even ever in the previous version have already won since v4 launched. Please join them!
Today, we will share with you an interview with one of our prized Community Members - Thumbs Up Finance. He is a writer who came to PoolTogether just this year and without a technical background or much experience in crypto.
As you’ll learn from his story, PoolTogether is very easy to get started with. Plus, everyone’s skills are useful in running the PoolTogether Community - which actually runs PoolTogether itself!
So, please enjoy this week’s interview with Thumbs Up Finance!
Tell us a bit about yourself. Describe yourself in a few words/facts:
I'm a big nerd :) . I read everything I can on subjects that randomly pop into my head, and sometimes I realize I've spent hours studying something I will never need to know.
How long have you been into crypto?
At the start of 2021, when I began my twitter account, I didn't own any crypto at all. Around that time, Bitcoin was in the news a lot, Elon was pumping it, and Canada was preparing to launch its ETFs, and so I started learning about it. As always, I went down the rabbit hole, and never came back out.
Do you want to tell us about the main lessons you have learned since then?
You will make mistakes. Try not to go too big too fast. Also, Ethereum is a not the best place to start.
What was your best crypto moment?
Connecting with the PoolTogether community.
That probably sounds like a canned response, but I genuinely mean it. Getting involved with PoolTogether shifted the entire course of this little creative project of mine, and helped me develop a lot of skills and a big audience quickly.
And your biggest fail?
Oof, there've been too many to count Let's go with the most simple, and most frequent mistake I make: engaging with maxis on twitter.
Just. don't. do. it.
How did you find out about PoolTogether?
I actually discovered PoolTogether way back before I ever tried DeFi. I don't remember how exactly I wound up there, but I was immediately obsessed with the idea. My blog was/is about personal finance and investing from the perspective of millennial (read: saddled with student debt) investor, or as I affectionately refer to us: small fries.
For that reason, the idea of prize savings really appeals to me. It's simultaneously asymmetric (which can be invaluable for those without a head start) and encourages saving, which is an important first step towards financial freedom.
A little while later I saw Leighton (Cusack, Co-Founder of PoolTogether) on Bankless, and he really sold me on the idea and the protocol itself. I committed to eventually writing about it, but I really didn't have any money to get started. With the help of the community and my existing fans, I was able to fund some initial content and since then it's been like a snowball rolling downhill. Everything from my audience, to my skillset, to my deposits in PoolTogether just keep getting bigger and bigger.
What made you stick around?
Once I joined the Discord, I was hooked. I wrote about it recently. The community around PoolTogether in particular has been inviting, helpful, and kind in a way I didn't expect.
Getting into crypto through twitter, I was so used to maxis going to war on the daily and I often found myself in the crossfire. The community around PoolTogether is exactly the opposite and seems to genuinely want others to succeed and that really appeals to me.
How are you involved in the community? Tell us about it.
I'm a writer. I came into all of this hoping to experiment in crypto, teach myself how it worked, and write about what I learned along the way I learned about the PoolGrants program but when I first applied, I didn't have a very clear idea, and I only had around 100 followers on Twitter, so I wasn’t really the ideal candidate…
So, I put up a goal on my Buy Me a Coffee: if I could raise $100, I would put that money towards trying out the newly launched Polygon USDT pool. Well I had about $25 so far, when Leighton caught wind of it, and he personally contributed the remainder of the goal.
That's when I made Polygon Pool Party. The post that basically taught me how to edit video, how to work with vectors in Affinity Photo, and how to do a lot of things in DeFi. Up until that point, I'd done very little, and mostly just haemorrhaged ETH paying gas fees
The post received really positive feedback both from my new audience on twitter and from the PoolTogether community. I got my first ongoing supporter on Buy Me a Coffee, as well as a small handful of individual tips. I also became more involved in PoolTogether, and this summer I applied for a grant to fund several more posts. It was approved and now most of that content is out in the world with more coming soon
Would you recommend PoolTogether to others? How would you describe it to them?
I can, and do, recommend PoolTogether to almost everyone I talk to about DeFi. Having had a lot of bad experiences with liquidity mining, including (but not limited to) my experience with Iron Finance, I like to steer people towards sensible starting points, and what's easier than something like PoolTogether? Especially with v4 out now!
I like to tell them it's like a savings account that pays your interest in lottery tickets You keep your original deposit, but the longer it's in there, the more chances you have to win. And you can win big! As I said above, asymmetric bets can be invaluable for small scale investors, so it's pretty easy for most people I talk with to see the appeal.
Are you involved in any other projects or communities?
Since my post about Celo, I've become a bit more involved in the Celo community on Discord. I did several of their Celo Journeys and won some Celo, which I of course deposited into PoolTogether. Celo is really nice project that doesn't try to reinvent the wheel. It's like Polygon, but with different priorities, and a different approach focused on crypto collateralized stablecoins and staking to participate in governance.
I wouldn't say I'm super involved in the Zapper community, but I do hang out a fair bit on their Discord and I love the product. Over time I'd like to find time to listen live to the community calls and do a bit more on the server, but I haven't found the time yet. Even listening to the PoolTogether calls is difficult as I am often working at my office on Fridays, but I always try to stake out a corner and my bluetooth headphones if I can.
I'm also a bit of an Index Coop evangelist I'm trying to find time to become more involved there over time. I'm a big believer in index products like ETFs in my stock market investing, and I love the option to set-it-and-forget-it on the crypto side too The whole team is really killing it over there, and I will do all I can to be involved.
Also, shoutout to my friends from the Boboshiba NFT community. This is a small Thai artist who's devoted to putting out good vibes. It's a very strange corner of the internet where everyone is just super kind and there's lots of cute pictures of dogs, so in other words, it's my kind of place.
Those are the main ones, but there are certainly communities like Gitcoin and Basic Attention Token that I really believe in and lurk their discords. I just wouldn't say I'm involved.
We hope you enjoyed this interview. We aim to bring you an interview each Friday with the main PoolTogether Community Newsletter coming up on Sunday.
Plus, we are working on introducing you soon to The Richard Show, the PoolTogether Community’s very own podcast featuring fun news and views on Crypto, DeFi and of course PoolTogether itself!