How to reduce gas fees?

Anyone have any recommendations for reducing the fees with ETH when attempting to do a deposit on a PoolTogether deposit?

For background: today is February 20th 2021. Because the price of ETH is really high and the network seems to be congested at times, transactions on all ETH based chains are expensive.

However, on PoolTogether the combination of the GWEI and the gas limit are at the equivalent of $250USD+ for a pool deposit transaction on DAI right now. My wallet is recommending a 600,000+ gas limit and 200+ GWEI which translates to extremely high fees.

Itā€™s interesting that a token swap on UNI swap DeFi exchange is around $50USD right now but a contract with POOL is three times as much. My understanding is the contract with a swap is smaller than a Pool Together deposit contract.

Hereā€™s the big issue for PoolTogether: It leaves out the ā€œregular personā€ that wants to do a small deposit every now and then to ā€œsaveā€ in a lossless lottery. It becomes such a huge barrier to people to come into crypto and especially PoolTogether.


Philosophical discussion topic: the original mission of pool together back when I joined in 2019 was to create a lossless lottery. The vast majority of people that participate in lotteries tend not to do savings. They tend to be poorer. Pool together was trying to change that paradigm by allowing people to participate in a lottery but allow them to also save. Many people cannot even save $250USD per month - yet alone incur a $250 fee just to participate in new way of saving and still have the excitement of ā€œgamblingā€. This is what originally tracked me to the program years ago and why Iā€™ve been a long time HODLer of my PT tickets.

Solutions:

Can we use this thread to capture ideas that could reduce the fees?

Here are a couple that I have:

#1 - Can the contract be further optimized to be not as complex?

#2 - Can an alternate blockchain chain be used with smaller fees?

#3 - From what I understand, POOL is being used as a governance token only. Could that blockchain or a similar DAO be established so that smaller transactions can be reasonably made? There is another post on here that references pooling transactions for the ā€œpoolā€. What about creating a second layer on PT that could facilitate this?

Looking forward to participating more and engaging in future discussions.

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Since this is becoming a very big topic that I think will eventually get solved, I think this is a great idea to put all the ideas in one place. Not sure if the forum is the best solution for this, but maybe someone has a recommendation.

On Discord I was pointed to this discussion:

Maybe we could benefit from the outcome.

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I believe there is some really good solutions in the works. The current v1 implementation of PieDAOs oven product is subsidized by the DAO but with oven v2 the gas fee will be proportionally split amongst all depositors in the ā€œbakeā€ session. Illustration below of v1, donā€™t see why it couldnā€™t work for Pool Tickets :slight_smile:

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@Hook - What do you think about a governance proposal for project management to fund organizing ideas that can be collaborated on? I have a skill set in that area. However, I do not think many people have the luxury to work for free for the community. Iā€™m not 100% sure how @Leighton gets paid for being one of the main figure heads for the program, but I think one of the first governance proposals should be funding the people who are leading the community such as yourself, @Leighton and others.

My 0.000000400BTC - for what its worth.

@chriscrypto , I appreciate your confidence in me, but like you I also have a very small amount of crypto funds. Iā€™m also a very new member to the community. Pool together doesnā€™t pay Leighton. As an original developer he was allocated tokens to give him substantial governance. If he chooses to exchange those tokens for financial gain, that is his decision, but for now the only value in those tokens are what they are worth to him. He can correct me if I am wrong. For proposals, there are opportunities to build into the contract a reward of POOL tokens. Which in turn gives that contributor additional governance. If you look on Sybil, you can find proposals from other apps like Compound and Uniswap.

Right now, user: kames, is making strides on a way to reduce gas fees like you have mentioned above. If he is successful, and depending on his implementation, he may be compensated in POOL togethers.

This is glorious. Maybe we say 400 Satoshi worth?

And yes kames is in progress on something along the lines of gas reduction. Thereā€™s other ideas scattered about this board so thereā€™s some cat wrangling to be done to suss out the most applicable ideas.

Catsā€¦ all these proposals are more like squirrels! haha. Thanks @Taliskye .

Iā€™m personally pretty excited about @gaborā€™s NFT ideas. I think a lot of cross marketing can be achieved. Wait, was that another squirrel?

In all seriousness, Iā€™m happy to help with better organization of ideas and thoughts. Iā€™m a big fan of Trello and would be happy to create a community based board where everyone could participate and use the forum as the discussion point?

Would that be helpful to herd these animals (squirrels, catsā€¦ dare I say ā€˜dogsā€™)?

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I suggest we analyze the possibility of a sidechain, like MATIC, aavegotchi migrated to matic due to the high gas rates,
I think it would be possible for POOLTOGETHER.

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I donā€™t know the feasibility or integration efforts of these suggestions but I believe PAID is now using BSC for Purchasing Agreements. Also I believe IOTA now has smart contracts that are fee less.

I would also like dev/team thoughts on this. It seems to work well at PieDAO - Iā€™ve used it multiple times

Surely we are talking about the following options;

  1. Wait for Ethereum 2 and hope its soon and does actually decrease costs (as ethereum prices increase so does gas!)
  2. Use a layer 2 solution there are a few leading candidates out there and I would be surprised if the team arenā€™t already looking into these. This route seems to be the path most in the space are taking.
  3. Use another blockchain! Here I think you have to make a decision on whether you are willing to compromise or not on decentralisation. If not then youā€™re talking Polkadot , Cardano or maybe one or two others but none of them are live yet. Maybe this year?
    Thoughts?

I think this issue can be worked with starkwareltd.

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Hello, I am brand new to pool and love the project. I was going to deposit 12 UNI a couple weeks ago but the transaction fee was more than the value I was depositing. I chose not to join the UNI pool because of that. I really hope the gas fees get reduced really soon. I think Pool would grow much larger instantly!

Good luck to everyone working on a solution!! <3

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I also have some experience in project management in the construction world. if there is anything i can do to help let me know. i agree it would be good to organize these ideas into a more coherent path.

I think Layer 2 is the most reasonable solution at this time. i dont know how much development that would take though. i have only just begun using matic. it took me a while to get comfortable with moving to layer2. the bridge can be intimidating for newer users. it could take a little while to get liquidity onto layer2, but once youā€™re there its magical. i do not want to see this project move to BSC. my personal opionion.

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@RegisIsland - Can you share some of your experiences with some of the layer 2 (L2) protocols that youā€™ve worked with? Iā€™m really curious about your experience and which ones you like.

I played around with bridging to other chains. Avalanche and bsc. Couldnā€™t really get them to work. The only layer 2 Iā€™ve used is matic. I am currently mining QUICK with my trustswap. It was pretty easy to do. It only cost me 9$ to send eth to matic main net so itā€™s pretty affordable. Perhaps we can issue a bounty for someone to build the solution?

Iā€™m not an Ethereum scientist, but how can 0x have gas-free limit orders, but we canā€™t have gas-free DAI deposits. Seems like PT community could pick up the tab for any batched transactions over a certain deposit limit

0x is using a sidechain.

So the gas theyā€™re paying in negligible. PT is on the main chain so theyā€™d be bearing the full brunt of ETH Gas fees.

Since PT has some integration with Compound (and hopefully Yearn in the future) it would make sense to move to the same L2 that either of those platforms move to.