Thanks for instigating this thought experiment @MTheory! I hope people take the time to think about this and provide their personal vision.
So it’s April 2025…
A PoolTogether blog post was released this morning with a headline that says:
“Welcome, PartyBond, to the Prize Layer of the Internet!”
The article highlights the latest savings application that permissionlessly plugs into V5 using vaults powered by tokenized government bonds. The app uses account abstraction to allow Canadian residents to deposit and start winning in less than a minute using interac e-transfers (yeah, I chose Canada… this is my vision, bud; if you don’t like it, then stay out of my dream!). Winners are normally notified by email, but if you win that GP, you’ll also receive a plaque in the mail, commemorating your win (makes for good PR if people share pics with their win, eh?).
When people use PartyBond, they don’t know what PoolTogether is or how it works. They just know that if they save $, they can win prizes through a local, insured institution. From day one, PartyBond has had access to the full prize pool without having to bootstrap anything on their own. A $100k CAD Grand Prize is advertised on their landing page with links to short video explainers on how it works.
Meanwhile, a discord community member shares a story about how they set their family up with an abstracted group savings account and have been transferring some money in every paycheck using a local bank transfer service. Not only have they been able to save in USD, but they got some decent wins along the way, which they put towards their kids’ education fund.
New open source developer tooling makes it easier than ever to plug in to the protocol with built-in AA options and out-of-the-box configurable prize hooks. The Cabana factory app includes options for people to set up NFT sweepstakes programs, custom prize-based token staking, and many default yield sources.
The teams behind PartyBond and a couple other apps that have built on the protocol have started to share their own integrations, giving back with open source prize hooks, custom vaults, and even ideas on how to iterate the prize pool to offer better prize experiences for their unique use cases. A group of core PoolTogether contributors create a non-profit with the goal of continuing the core protocol growth through grants for core development. They secure initial funding for this goal through one of the last PTBRs from governance. The end of an era, and the start of a new one. The first actions from the non-profit are to set up donation vaults and prize hooks that anyone can use to support the core development in a no-loss way. With the dispersion of protocol usage comes more decentralized contribution to the codebase, with external teams like PartyBond leading development on new features while core contributors continue to manage codebases and development documentation, acting as stewards for the growing spiderweb of protocol development.
The non-profit begins reaching out to new L2s and yield sources with goals of securing grant funding that will be passed on to small teams to build unique PoolTogether applications on those networks. The non-profit is nimble, reputable, and KYC’d, making it easy to act as a middle man for funding new PoolTogether integrations.
@Tjark starts off the community call with an exciting bit of news: “Over $2m in prizes have now been awarded since the launch of V5!”
Reflection for future self: How did the year really go? How did PoolTogether impact people’s lives? Where will it go now?