Stormwater Hydrology, Yolo'ing ETH, and PoolTogether
PoolTogether Community Interview #21: DaBoom
Welcome to the latest edition of the PoolTogether Community Interview. This week we’re excited to learn more about one of our PT Community Members who’s a stormwater hydrologist (I think that’s how you say it?) and got his first taste of the sweet crypto world by making bank on the Spring 2021 ETH run-up, then not so much a few months later…meet: DaBoom.
Tell us a little bit about yourself. Describe yourself in a few words/facts?
I model stormwater hydrology for a living in the U.S. I’m currently a few months out from becoming a parent with my wife that I met in college. I’d describe myself as a dreamer. I feel I’m ambitious and driven and I have a passion for sports, particularly golf and American football.
How long have you been into crypto?
I made my first crypto purchase at the end of March of 2021. I had heard about it for a while, but unfortunately never paid much attention to it.
What lessons have you learned since then?
Don’t be “quick to click”. Most of the scams out there are simply bad actors taking advantage of people’s lack of awareness and F.O.M.O. I’ve learned that it’s almost impossible to adequately “DYOR” to 100% prevent being “rugged”. Proper precautions must be taken in order to properly defend against scams.
I’ve also learned that crypto goes far beyond the get-rich-quick narrative. The reach is global, permission-less thanks to the technology which I feel is just a small snowball at the top of Mt. Everest.
What was your best crypto moment?
Knowing nothing about crypto, I was hearing a lot about NBA Top Shots, and NFTs in general. I did some purely superficial research and figured whatever blockchain most NFTs lived on, was going to be a success, thus leading me to my first crypto trade: I bought 1 ETH at 1700 in March of 2021. I rode that wave all the way up to 4100 at the beginning of May.
What was your biggest fail?
My biggest fail was my second crypto trade…ever. After feeling pretty good about my first crypto trade, not realizing anything about anything, I bought 3 more ETH at 4100…on May 9th..2021…we all know what happened on May 10th. I wouldn’t exactly call this a fail, however. Sure, my portfolio (like many others) had just taken the biggest hit I had ever financially taken. But there was no way I was going to realize that loss. I panicked, but I did not sell; instead, I looked deeper into what I had just done. I know had 4 ETH on a CEX just sitting there and figured I might as well use whatever this is. Because of that huge, instant loss, I started learning everything I could about what it was I had bought. I read anything and everything from Coindesk articles to reddit propaganda; YouTube videos and rabbit hole exercises and realized that there was this whole other technology space that I never even knew existed in web3.
How did you find out about PoolTogether?
Through my journey of learning sparked by the intense crypto crash, I stumbled through dapp radar looking for dapps to mess around with. Towards the back of the Ethereum-based dapp pages (I scrolled through many pages), I found the “P”. The description said “no-loss” lottery which I thought “sure, what’s the catch?”. Of course, I had to try it out.
What made you stick around?
After a few months of participating in the pools, even though I hadn’t won, I saw that other people were winning and started to realize that the concept of prize-linked savings is an entirely more interesting way to save than I was used to, crypto or no crypto. I had a billion questions and so I joined the Discord only to find one of the best communities I’ve interacted with to date. And, if you’ve ever met Leighton, you know what a good dude that guy is, so I stayed.
How are you involved in the community?
I mainly just answer questions from new users and am active in our governance discussions and voting. I’ve recently started hosting ‘Pool Streaks’ which is a game only available to those who hold the Pool Token. Basically, I’ll post a question every day relating to a statistic of the next day’s draw and people can try to predict the outcome of that stat. If you can get six in a row, you win a decent delegation to your existing deposit. Currently the prize delegation is being delegated to the Unchained wallet in support of Ukraine.
I’d like to learn more about solidity and developing to help build more features of the protocol, but for now I like to think my role is to be wherever I’m needed.
Would you recommend PoolTogether to others? How would you describe it to them?
I absolutely would, and I have. For Christmas I bought one of Gabor’s PT NFT Christmas Cards and gifted it to my brother. He was thinking about dabbling in bitcoin but didn’t really know what it was. To ease him into the space I introduced him to PoolTogether through the Christmas Card idea, and he instantly loved the idea. In his words “it’s like getting a FREE scratch off…daily!” While I’m not an advocate for gambling, I did enjoy his enthusiasm for the “no-loss” with reward aspect of PT…so that was good enough for me.
Are you involved in any other projects or communities?
I am not really a contributor anywhere else like I am with PT. I am involved with Good Morning News (GMN) as a holder of their NFT (found them through this interview of Diego Chippi.eth a while back. They are a great community just like PT, so I stuck around with them. They’re even running an ad in their Newspaper NFT explaining how delegation to the Unchained wallet through PT is available! Super cool people. The only other community I’m active in is the Crypto Caveman on Solana. I bought that guy as part of my ‘learning all things’ initiative and I think those guys are building something neat that should be coming out soon (been holding this for almost 7 months now) and the core team is top notch, so again, I stuck around.
Do you have any other thoughts and comments you would like to make?
I just want to give a shoutout to this community. The formation and organization of this DAO is amazing to see. From the big brains of the Treasury Working Group and the professionalism of the Marketing Working Group to the leadership of the Exec Team, it’s truly awesome to see it form and a lot of these people have never met before PT. I don’t think anyone has even met Underthesea in real life, but that person is the leader of our exec team, and for good reasons. If we could get them a decent server, there’s no telling what else they could build. Brendan seems to be the guy that wrote all my calculus books in college (did you see that derivation of chance on the gov forum?) so he’s clearly a genius…and that voice though. I’ve asked Dylan so many questions I don’t even have to ping him anymore. He just responds, and as I mentioned before, Leighton, can’t say enough about that guy. He reminds me of the Grinch when his heart grew three sizes in one day. Big shout out to PT, Inc. for including the world in your ideas, and thanks for decentralizing this beast.
We hope that you have enjoyed this interview and learned a different perspective on the journeys our community members take to find and get involved with PoolTogether.
Please learn more about depositing at PoolTogether.com and join us in the PoolTogether Discord to become a part of our Community.
