PoolTogether Community Newsletter #35
PoolTogether on Optimism, New PT Inc Hire, Intro to Team Budget Request, OPeration Education, Merch Design Contest & much more! 🌊🏆
Sup winners, hey swimmers, hello to all Poolers!
While spooky month is in full swing, the community is driving up the frequency and is as busy as ever! Scroll on for an overview of the recent PoolTogether updates, governance happenings, and community vibes. 🌊🏆
Updates 🆕
PoolTogether on Optimism so far 📈
Here is a quick rundown of some optimistic numbers for you all.
$36,448,286 total value locked
14,754 depositors
Since launching on Optimism, >$118,000 in prizes have been claimed by winners, and the protocol distributed 302,000 $OP on top of that. Good times to be a Pooler!
Friday’s Winner Report 🏆
Every Friday, we broadcast a weekly winner report across Twitter, Lens, and our Community Call. The report covers all of PoolTogether V4 for the past week.
👉 Drop by our community Discord and help us in growing PoolTogether and with it its prize!
New PoolTogether Inc Hire 🍪
Say hello to PoolTogether Inc’s newest member, Ncookie! Ncookie has been an active Pooler and the community’s favorite biscuit for months. What started out on a DAO Onboarding Call now goes full circle to make up the perfect PoolTogether Love Story. Since Ncookie joined the community, he got involved in many campaigns, projects, and experiments and always found a way to apply his skills somewhere where they are needed.
Here is a special POAP in honor of this news which was given out on our last Community Call. Credit to Oops, as always!
Check out some of Ncookie’s projects and ping @ncookie to tell him how awesome he is:
KuCoin x Polygon Ecosystem Carnival 🎭
PoolTogether is part of the KuCoin Wallet X Polygon Ecosystem Carnival! The whole spectacle begins Tuesday, October 11th. Participants can win a share of $35,000 in prizes and earn special NFTs while doing so! Watch the announcements for more information on how to get involved.
Integración @ Devcon Bogota 🤝
Are you in Bogota for Devcon? PoolTogether is a proud sponsor of Integración - a DeFi Onboarding event free to the public!
On October 12th and 13th, people will be coming through and learning about crypto while filling up their wallets with some first NFTs & tokens! The event is entirely free, catered, and includes a sweet afterparty hosted by Metacartel.
If you are a PoolTogether community member: Please consider coming to volunteer. You will be guiding people on how to take their USDC, and deposit it into PoolTogether. The team teaches people from 12:00-4:00 pm each day, then has an open floor hang out afterward.
You are welcome to come and participate, or educate. All the topics are intended to be entry-level, so anyone is able to help teach anyone.
If you have friends in Bogota that have never used cryptocurrencies: Please tell them about this event, and encourage them and their friends to attend.
👉 Reach out in Integración * Onboarding Devcon on Discord if you want to participate or learn more!
Prize Notifications via Push Protocol 🔔
With their official launch on Polygon, Push Protocol, is now supporting PoolTogether prize notifications!
What does this mean? You’re able to receive push notifications for winning prizes on Polygon and Ethereum via the Push mobile app, dApp, or browser extension! Follow the links below for more information:
👉 Subscribe to the Channel
👉 Learn how it works
Pooly Wearables 🦜🛟
Two weeks ago, we celebrated our first Pooly wearable drop at the Decentral Games metaverse party in Decentraland. Our frens at Decentral Games airdropped >13,000 wearable NFTs to PoolTogether depositors. The NFT doesn’t just look like a super cool purple floaty; it also allows you to play!
Word on the street is they might do it again. So if you haven’t yet, make sure to deposit on Polygon or Optimism, and maybe you’ll see a floatie floating into your wallet, too. 👀
$OP Rewards on-going 🔴
This is no news but let’s say it louder for those in the back: We’re heading into week 12 of Optimism Rewards, and the protocol continues to distribute 27,500 $OP tokens every week! All PoolTogether depositors on Optimism earn their share of the weekly rewards based on their deposit during the week’s epoch.
You can see your rewards accruing in real-time on the accounts page and claim them every Tuesday!
PoolTogether Governance Overview 🏛
Introduction to Team Budget Requests
Posted by Leighton on the governance forum
Since the POOL token launched, a community of contributors has grown around the protocol. This is a very good thing! The activity comes in many different forms from different people but the shorthand expression of “PoolTogether DAO” has sometimes been used to refer to it.
But what is “The PoolTogether DAO”? Each person you asked would have a different answer. As of today, it doesn’t mean anything specific, it’s just a catch all phrase to identify the tens of thousands of people who use or contribute to the protocol in various ways.
Despite the ambiguity, the emergence of the phrase “PoolTogether DAO” points to a real desire people have to contribute to the protocol. It is therefore important to 1) create clearer ways for people to contribute to the protocol and 2) determine if a “PoolTogether DAO” should be created and how it might be structured. The ultimate goal being to create processes that are transparent and non-hierarchical while also enabling coordination and clear on-ramps for entities that want to contribute.
The “Team Budget Request” Structure for contributions
PoolTogether community members are likely already familiar with the PTIP (PoolTogether improvement proposal). It’s a template for submitting proposed updates to the protocol. This template has simplified and unified the submission process.
A new template is being introduced named Team Budget Requests (TBR). It’s a template specific for requesting funding for “teams” to do work in the protocol ecosystem. Similar to the PTIP, the goal is to provide a simple and unified template that can be used. This should 1) make it simpler for people to understand how to contribute 2). Make it easier for POOL token holders as they evaluate and vote on requests and 3). Improve coordination and accountability among “teams” that receive funding.
Similar to a PTIP, all TBRs should first be submitted in draft mode with the request for comment tag (RFC). Then a finalized proposal and vote.
Note, the word “teams” is being used loosely here. More on that below.
Coordination of Contributors via “The Council”
As more and more companies are contributing and using the protocol in various ways, there will be an increasing need for some level of communication and coordination. However, it’s imperative that both the protocol and community remain maximally permissionless and decentralized – to achieve both of these goals, a new discussion forum is being proposed called “The Council”.
Similar to the every Friday community calls, there will be a council meeting every Tuesday. The meeting will be open to anyone who is on any team. The purpose of these meetings will be to update the other teams on progress and collaborate as desired or needed.
What are “teams”?
Anyone entity receiving money for contributing to the protocol needs to be doing so in a legally compliant way. For that reason, it’s important that “Teams” = legal entities.
If individuals want to form teams that are not around an existing legal entity they should use tools like Kali, Wrappr, Opolis, or others that might make sense for them to create one.
Disclaimer – none of this can be relied upon as legal advice. Anyone with legal questions should consult a lawyer.
Is this the PoolTogether DAO?
At this stage, there has never been and there is not currently any proposal to create a “PoolTogether DAO”. That would mean formally voting to create an entity and defining what a PoolTogether DAO represents and who is in it. Doing this might be advisable at some point in the future and it will be important for community members to keep in touch with the latest legal thinking. Anyone is free to put forward a proposal towards those goals if desired.
What is most important to keep clear is that just like today, POOL token holders will not have any control of the entities that may receive distributions from the protocol. For example, if POOL token holders vote to distribute funding to Code Arena to perform smart contract audits. Token holders do not control Code Arena. The POOL token solely controls a limited set of action on-chain for the protocol and does not control any people or companies. Likewise, no people or companies work for token holders or are managed by them. The protocol remains non-custodial with all user deposits outside the control of POOL token holders and only controllable by depositors themselves.
As a PoolTogether contributor - what should I do now?
Review the drafts of the current TBRs
Reach out to in #council-chat if you consider creating a team
Ask questions, provide feedback, voice concerns, and get involved
Continue discussing on if a PoolTogether DAO should be created
You can read previous posts around that topic here:
Community ✨
PoolTogether Community Interview feat CryptoMom 🧗♀️
For the 41st time, our Pool Reporter SmartInvestor talked to one of the exciting people that make up our community. Some of you know her from our weekly Community Calls already; the rest of you is lucky to meet her now: CryptoMom.
This interview marks an end of an era of SmartInvestor’s community interviews. A big shoutout for giving us insight into so many PoolTogether individuals. We’ll be back with another format to highlight our community members soon!
👉 Read the full interview on Substack
OPeration: Education 🧑🏫
PoolTogether is the best tool for onboarding people to DeFi. It’s not only that the protocol is no loss, easy to understand, and simple to use - the community surrounding PoolTogether is also one of the most welcoming and wholesome in the whole ecosystem.
We want to reward some of these community members for their incredible work in helping PoolTogether grow: We are looking for up to 10 community members to host their own educational event. You choose the language, location, and audience - we will help you get prepared!
Reward: Up to 10 POOL Hodlers will receive 300 $OP tokens each
👉 Find out more and apply to host your event on Dework
Merch Design Contest 🎨
It’s easy to feel like a winner at PoolTogether. Help our Poolers to look like one by creating some drippy PoolTogether apparel! We want you to send us your best PoolTogether Hoodie designs. You can help us spread the word by letting your designer friends know about this bounty. How cool would it be to sport some PoolTogether merch designed by them?
Winners will be decided by community vote. All voters have the chance to win some of the winning merch. Lots of reasons to get involved!
The best submissions will make their way into our new community Merch Store. Special thanks to Noxe for bringing it online!
Reward: 150 POOL for 2 winners
👉 Submit your Design before Oct 25th on Dework
Pool Streaks Season VII 👑
After a short break, PoolStreaks is back with Season VIII.
PoolStreaks is a prediction game we play on PoolTogether Discord. Every day when the prize draw timer hits 0, a new question is posted in the #poolstreaks channel. The first player to get 6 questions correct without missing one, will win a week-long delegation of 9,000 PoolTogether tickets.
Disclaimer: To be able to view the channel, you need to verify as POOL holder on Discord.
What’s up this week at PoolTogether? 🗓
Monday (Oct 10)
Tuesday (Oct 11)
#PoolStreaks Season Kick-Off
Wednesday (Oct 12)
Community Podcast feat Zerion
Thursday (Oct 13)
Friday (Oct 14)
Press 📰
OP Radio #3
PoolTogether was the guest of OP Radio Episode 3!
👉 Listen on Twitter
Polygon Alpha Podcast with Leighton
👉 Watch on Youtube or listen on Apple Podcast
PoolTogether Community Podcast feat Granary
The Granary is a decentralized, user-driven borrowing and lending liquidity market inspired by AAVE. Hotmike spoke with Community Manager Sweet Cheeks about yield, decentralization, regulation, NFTs, and ways that PoolTogether and The Granary could potentially work together in the future.
👉 Listen on Substack⏐Apple Podcast⏐Spotify
PoolTogether Community Podcast feat Layer2DAO
If you’re a Mainnet maxi, you might want to skip this one and listen to Vitalik because, well… apparently Layer 2s are the fuuuuuture. Exo and Weston from Layer2DAO are here on Hotmike’s pod to tell us the future of Layer 2s and how they intend to make them succeed through Layer2DAO.
👉 Listen on Substack⏐Apple Podcast⏐Spotify
Tweets 🦩
See you at the pool 🍹🐠
Stay wavy my Poolers! Before you leave make sure you..
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