Meet The Nation | PoolTogether Co-Founder Leighton Cusack
Leighton Cusack, Co-Founder & ‘Contributor to decentralized finance protocols’
PoolTogether is one of the oldest DeFi Protocols, having been around for about two years. It offers users access to no-loss lotteries; founder Leighton Cusack describes it as a savings account, and the interest generated by the collective deposits are combined into randomly selected lotteries. Like most DeFi project, it is permissionless, trustless, and powered by smart contracts.
Unlike legacy lotteries, which require purchasing tickets, access to PoolTogether lotteries only requires depositing funds which can be pulled out in full at any time. There are currently $225 Million in assets deposited in PoolTogether, earning the interest that becomes rewards for the PoolTogether community.
PoolTogether also has a reserve, which contributes to an increasing treasury. These sponsorships are deposits that are not eligible to win prizes. Instead, these returns are circled back to the pool to yield further interest. This is a perpetual growth mechanism for increasing the reward sizes over time.
PoolTogether recently decentralized with its POOL governance token, and POOL was retroactively airdropped to all users earlier this year. It is also distributed to everyone who deposits in one of the lottery pools. The POOL token controls the protocol by managing the reserves, the number of winners announced weekly, integrations and new pools, and the distribution mechanism of the remaining POOL.