pooltogether-community-ui VS l2beat

First off, wanted to say thanks very much for posting this, primarily because I think it is an example that is straightforward and easy to understand. That said, I'm also thinking "if this is one of the best, straightforward examples people are talking about when referring to 'the value of smart contracts', then smart contracts are just nowhere near the important tech its boosters believe." (To be clear mteigers, not directing this at you, just saying this because what you've posted is probably the best example of a real-world use case I've seen).

In summary, what PoolTogether (https://pooltogether.com/) does is basically act like a normal savings account, except instead of you getting 4% interest a year or whatever, that interest is all pooled and then given out in big chunks at random - most people get nothing, but "winners" will get what is essentially everyone else's interest. Some notes:

1. I'm not clear what activity they're engaging in that actually generates interest (e.g. who they're lending to in order to generate a spread), but in fairness I didn't spend much going into the details. That said, if they really are generating income by lending, then I'm very curious how they can't suffer from some of the same negative edge-cases inherent in fractional reserve banking, like a run on the bank. If they are not generating real income from lending, I'm very suspect about how they can really be generating interest. Again, I didn't look much into this, so totally admit I could just not be understanding the details here.

2. I see absolutely no real benefit that comes from doing this as a smart contract vs. just doing this as any other kind of normal software (e.g. what core banking software provides), despite what their blurbs on the website say.

So still just dumbfounded by the lack of real utility in any of these smart contract examples I've seen.

Take a look: https://pooltogether.com

PoolTogether: Transforming Savings Games and Lotteries

How about defend a prize-linked savings program from an individual that placed around $12 into the protocol before immediately filing a lawsuit?

Have you checked out PoolTogether. You earn yield in the form of prizes and if you deposit on optimism you also earn OP tokens. It’s like a DeFi savings account for USDC. Worth looking into if you haven’t already.

Pooltogether uses their token for governance but you absolutely do not need to have it to use the product or participate in anything. It’s strictly used for voting in governance. No blockers

There's literally one project that I've seen being truly useful: https://pooltogether.com/

It's cool because it's not possible to do this without crypto (in terms of trust). But because it uses a smart contract you can be sure that when you put your money into it, it won't steal it.

We could easily incentivize no-loss lotteries like https://pooltogether.com/ I wonder how that affects problem gamblers? If there's no opportunity to actually lose anything do problem gamblers choose other options?

POOL - PoolTogether https://pooltogether.com/ Open source pooled savings account/lottery with twice weekly draws

A real layer 2 would look more like something built on Ethereum (can see all its L2s at https://l2beat.com).

Essentially it's a separate network that every few minutes takes every transaction and compresses it into a data blob that it saves on Ethereum along with a proof that the computation was done correctly. The Ethereum L1 nodes then only need to verify the proof instead of re-executing all transactions that happened on the L2.

With this design users can go straight from an exchange like Coinbase onto the L2 and never need to use Ethereum, and fees are 10x cheaper because of the data compression. Fees will soon be 100x cheaper as Ethereum is adding extra space just for these L2 data blobs that is much cheaper than normal Ethereum data space.

Unfortunately it can't be done on Bitcoin right now because Bitcoin nodes don't have Turing complete scripting and so can't verify the proof that an L2 posts to Bitcoin.

We are running & maintaining the site (https://l2beat.com). Our work is to look on the current Layer 2 deployments on Ethereum & show risks and statistics to the end user. Very interesting thing is that we are a public goods company trying to stay as objective as possible in the industry full of subjectivity. What I mostly like in this job is that I am a part of the project shaping how it looks, not only mindlessly taking someones orders.

Candidate:

Ecosystem fragmentation is not necessarily a bad thing. It leads to rapid development through competition. Different L2s are competing against each other to provide the best service and that has lead to a cambrian explosion of solutions. It's also a very effective way to explore the solution space, I'm sure many will disappear, others will get eaten, and at some point there will be consolidation. But all this seems like a good approach early on when tackling complex problems for which the ideal trade-offs are not entirely obvious. Explore as much of the solution space as possible and trim later on.

A perhaps more pernicious problem is liquidity fragmentation. Moving assets between L2s is a tedious friction that leads to fragmentation of liquidity. In that respect, zero-knowledge rollups present a big advantage as you can share liquidity between them as long as they share some zk-circuits that allow to prove statements to both chains. All this is being very actively worked on. And the technology behind it is short of fascinating. The typical HN audience would have a huge hard-on for it, if they didn't have such a strong preconception against crypto-anything.

If anyone is curious to learn more about L2s a good starting point is here: https://l2beat.com/

And if you want to see Ethereum scaling progress you can check it here: https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity

The next major upgrade to the protocol, slated for late this year or early 2024 (date is not finalized yet), will focus on scalability by making L2 activity veeery cheap.

These two links will give you a lot of the info you need to compare L2s: https://l2beat.com/ and https://www.growthepie.xyz/ - enjoy.

Source: https://l2beat.com

Thanks! l2beat.com is the best.

In addition to what others said, I always find https://l2beat.com useful to see a summary of the security assumptions behind the various L2s. Currently, all L2 need to be trusted to some extent as they are still quite in development.

Exponential.fi has good summaries and links to the projects. And https://l2beat.com is also great for judging L2s.

Take a careful look at https://l2beat.com