The PoolTogether goal of increasing savings and rewarding participants through lottery-style prizes has been incredibly successful so far. Where PoolTogether falls short is in the lack of real-time options to access the money that has been saved when needed.
I’d like to propose that PoolTogether create a separate debit pool which will allow users to spend their USDC through a debit card and still qualify for drawings.
While this would be a complex solution, it doesn’t have to be a complicated one.
Potential solution: create another token, dbtUSDC, with a separate, smaller prize pool. This is essentially creating the equivalent of a yield-bearing checking account. This pool would be the source for payments through the debit card or payments processor. PTaUSDC could be swapped for dbtUSDC, essentially giving the user a “checking” and a “savings” account, which is a model that is very familiar to users.
There are several approaches to handling the infrastructure for this, and this would require some research to get right. Here are some ideas:
Establish a line of credit with a white-label bank that is settled up daily or weekly. The bank issues the cards and users spend from the line of credit with authorization being drawn from their dbtUSDC balance.
Partner with a payments processor such as Circle who already processes fiat payments from USDC and connect them with a debit card service such as Hydrogen to handle the physical/virtual cards.
PoolTogether should absolutely be tied into traditional finance! I don’t think a separate pool is needed; people just need to be able to access their funds through existing banking infrastructure.
We’ve also been talking about integrating with companies that bridge fiat to defi; namely Fireblocks (but there are many others). If banks could access PoolTogether through a web 2.0 style API that could unlock a massive retail market.
Are you going to pursue the business development and partnerships? Or is simply an idea that you’re throwing out?
Im just imagining you walking into some stuffy bankers network building conference.
“Sup doods, wanna transform your crumbling, boring old banking infrastructure into the exciting new world of DeFi where all the cool crypto kids are? Come work with us at PoolTogether. We need your plastic card pressing machines and you need our users and service.”
Yeah, there’s a reason I recommended FinTech startups as partners and not tradFi banks. At this point the only way to fix banking is to tear it down and start over. I’ve spent nearly my whole career in tradFi and I can tell you it’s technically possible to move existing banks into the future, but it’s not humanly possible. Nobody is willing to make the changes necessary. Not when they have their golden parachutes and their Too Big To Fail backstops. The profits are great and the market is captive. Why change?
Little do they realize that DeFi players like PoolTogether and Olympus have already rendered them obsolete and it’s just a matter of time for the market to realize it.
Too true. We just need to roll out the red carpet for users and make it as comfortable for them as possible to onboard. Some physical plastic they can use when they buy groceries at the shop is a big step towards that.
@Brendan - I may have some good leads to a major European/US Fintech player that may be interested in an idea like this. Let me do some background work on this and keep everyone involved. Fantastic idea @JEEPNEY
I love were this is going. Strong teamwork in this thread.
I’ve actually also started looking into this for Germany.
We have a green & fair branded fintech called Tomorrow, which has some great overlaps in values.
Nice! Tomorrow looks awesome! I’ve honestly only been part of this community for a short time and I can already see PT has something really special going on.
This is a good topic to explore, thanks for posting! Hopefully someone can step up to try to build these types of relationships that can be huge bridges to Pool Together.
It sure feels like we are close to these types of giant unlocks. This article says the Ledger debit card supports several coins including erc-20s. While V3 has a claim model to prizes, the claim can be called by anyone, so a contract could potentially push the prizes out. I suppose Ledger may not use individual addresses for each card holder and that could be a complication. There may be some technical hurdles but they lessen by the day, and the different card products seem to be popping up everywhere.
I shared this thread with Varun (founder at onJuno). Even if debit card idea does not work, i am really optimistic that integrations between OnJuno and PoolTogether are mutually beneficial to all of us.
I am still leveraging my connections with European Fintech firm, but with limited success…
We are currently working on a crypto card in MENA region as part of our centralized exchange offerings, where a prepaid card would be linked to each user wallet and they can spend crypto directly at POS, ATMs and online.
A partnership with a defi platforms is on the horizon and I would love it to be Pooltogether. Especially given the popularity of traditional saving account prizes that is a big sector in the region.
This is also the way e.g. Monolith.xyz works. You need to fund a prepaid card with crypto (aave interest bearing token already work) and can then spend it whereever VISA is accepted. This model is getting killed by gas and it has not been reasonable to use it very actively for more than half a year due to this. Max limit on card is 8000 EUR and gas to fund is already 100$.
Curious how Ledger is solving it, I would have assumed a same approach.
