Thanks to @chriscrypto @Torgin @qwercus @nulladiem and @Funkykow for inspiration, discussion and contribution.
Summary: Non-Fungable Tokens (NFTs) offer high potential to market PoolTogether (PT) to a broader audience. Likewise, NFTs allow creatives such as graphic designers, artists and NFT collectors to tap into the PoolTogether community to gain a broader reach.
The outlined NFT strategy includes two ideas to leverage NFTs for marketing and community building,
- PoolTogether x NFT Artists - A collaboration with NFT artists
- PoolTogether NFT Prize Checks - Minting of check NFTs to winners
- PoolTogether Golden Ticket - Minting a golden ticket NFT to winners for a future larger/creative prize
1. PT x NFT Artists
As the world largest no-loss lottery, PoolTogether provides a valuable entertainment and service to encourage people to save money. In addition, PT participants get acquainted with crypto currencies and gain the additional exposure to the new area of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space.
A feature of PT with untapped potential is the loot box. The loot box is a donation box where anyone can donate tokens or NFTs. At the end of each lottery period (typically a week), the loot box is also sent to the winner that rounds lottery. The loot box is mostly used by other crypto projects to reach the PoolTogether community for marketing purposes.
Since the launch and initial airdrop of the POOL token in February 2021, the PT protocol has done a quantum leap in investments into each of the four current pools. As evidenced of this significant market capitalization, almost $100m Assets under Management, >15,000 followers on Twitter and more than 4,000 players in the DAI pool.
The loot box also represents a significantly undervalued and unexplored tool for NFT creators to gain reach and popularity. The utility of the loot box is little known in the world especially in the even more niche market of crypto enthusiasts. This could be changed significantly through collaborations with NFT artists by way of a weekly featured artwork. It could be an existing artwork that is simply donated or a specific one created with a PT theme. For example, the PT Discord #meme channel is full of inspiration where there are no limits to creativity. Once this gets traction, more and more artists may realize that the PT community is an additional platform to use for marketing by sending their NFTs to the contribution address.
The integration into the UI should be fairly straightforward. On the pool overview page, the overview of the loot box content can be split into tokens (left) and NFTs (right). A featured NFT could be displayed in the showcase and can have an expandable view upon hovering/selecting/clicking. Once the user has interacted with the NFT section (right), some additional detail could appear with some detail on the artist, social media account, OpenSea/Makersplace/Superrare/Rarible/… link, etc.
NFT content could be implemented through solutions such as www.nfte.app. The other NFTs in the loot box could be viewed by opening an expandable gallery. This would allow potential and existing ticket holders to check out what prizes are hidden inside the loot box. Inspiration from a graphic designer for implementing the loot box with the NFTs in a “fun way” could be similar to the loot boxes that are implementation with many popular multiple games such as Overwatch. The box could “spin” and “explode” with all sorts of currencies (cryptos) and goodies (NFTs). This additional interaction could further perpetuate the fun of interacting with PT and encourage people to come back weekly - even if it is to just to experience the loot box “exploding”. Just to provide one idea for how to play around with this.
Allocation of prizes is cost-intensive. At first, it may be easier to provide the NFTs for each lottery cycle directly to the grand prize winner. However, it could be explored whether the NFTs could be awarded to random additional winners to also allow for more winners. Perhaps over time as well, this could paired across a tiered winner structure (i.e. 2nd place, 3rd place, etc). The larger lotteries provide those kinds of tiered prizes and incentives as well. A potentially good idea from another Governance post is to reward the loot box only to players with POOL holdings to add value/reward to such holders. At current state every player in the pool should qualify for this criteria and this would become more relevant after expiry of POOL rewards.
The implementation of this proposal should not require any changes to the smart contracts but rather be limited to the user interface. Appetite with known artists needs to be checked and it might be worth allocating a limited amount of the treasury to ignite this movement which hopefully will attract voluntary contributors organically.
2. PT x NFT Prize Checks
PoolTogether (PT) was originally designed from the concept of a lottery. With a traditional lottery, there is a big check that is presented to the winner including an official ceremony. For all those that didn’t win, this provides a valuable psychological incentive for others to participate in the lottery in the future. Many people do not necessarily want to be the center of attention after winning a lottery. However, this strategy is an important aspect to maintaining the prestige of the lottery and for future validity in presenting the winnings.
Minting of respective NFT based prize checks as an automatic mechanism (or even featured NFT) sent to the addresses of the winners could be a fun and incredibly inexpensive marketing gimmick for PT. A PT winner with the NFT would be an easy way for the winner to share “their luck” with friends, family or even publicly on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.
For those desiring a little more anonymity, all winners could burn their awarded NFT. This would be in the event that they do not want to show their winning check in their wallet. However, privacy is not guaranteed with any blockchain transaction because wallet addresses are publicly visible on pooltogether.com. Some level of anonymity is still maintained with PT where many traditional lotteries require you to stand in front of the camera with the large check and smile.
This proposal could be fully automated. Minting on L1 is likely not considerable in light of gas fees. Therefore, a L2 solution may need to be explored. A good implementation of a similar idea is TokenizedTweets ( https://tokenizedtweets.com/ ). TokenizedTweets works with Matic/Polygon on L2. Treasury could allocate an appropriate amount of POOL to fund a graphic designer and a coder.
3. PT x NFT Golden Ticket
As an additional NTF incentive in the loot box, PT could enable an NFT as a “Golden Ticket”. This NFT could be exchanged for future promotions and competitions borrowed from concepts such as the movie “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” These checks could be tickets on their own for admission to something very unique in the future. For instance, in a potential future airdrop, the golden tickets could receive an over proportionately high allocation similar to uniswap $SOCKS. The golden ticket concept could be a significant development to making the PT based NFTs become even more valuable to the recipients.
well I fully support this…. And I will keep reading to get up to speed. 
y’all are amazing!