👋 Hi Farcaster! I’d love to introduce myself and share about the protocol I’m building. 

I have led products at Uniswap and bought bitcoin back in 2015.

I’m a software engineer, product manager, and dad who lives in San Francisco... 🧵

building the largest onchain lottery /megapot • 🟪 #45, FID #1575 • ex @uniswap, now south park commons

When I started working at Uniswap, I appreciated how the protocol was successful because it brought together fragmented token order books

I also loved how Uniswap is public infrastructure that is financially valuable.

So I thought to myself, what other fragmented pools of assets could work well for a protocol?

A year later, I left Uniswap because I was so excited to build a protocol startup and I also wanted to get sleep.

I was inspired by @jacob's article on hyperstructures: https://jacob.energy/hyperstructures.html

I tested ideas around ad networks, identity, privacy, and payments but didn’t find product market fit

One day, I was talking to my mom and she mentioned how she has bought a lottery ticket every weekend for a decade. 

That’s when it clicked. 

Every state and country has a giant pool of money that’s separated by borders. It’s a lottery prize pool.

If these pools were combined and accessible anywhere, the jackpot would be massive, and get even more exciting

What if we made the fairest, lowest fee lottery for the world?

I then spent some time thinking about if this is really what I wanted to spend the next decade working on

In the end, yes, it was. People will always want to gamble

Crypto is full of scams, casinos take a large margin, and lotteries take even larger margins

You don’t have to condone gambling to want to improve it. It’s a noble goal to reduce consumer prices.

I recognized that just putting a lottery online wasn’t conducive to building a mega jackpot, getting distribution, and there's significant regulatory concerns

So I thought back to my experience at Uniswap where I worked on liquidity provision and with legal on token and NFT compliance

megapot

Also, to my time at Lyft, where I built incentive algorithms for multi-sided networks

That’s when I realized there’s a better way.

I started building /megapot in January

We launched two months ago and have grown to be crypto’s largest lottery

We have a daily $130k jackpot and have run $5M in lotteries

9 apps are building on our lottery-as-a-service protocol

We designed this protocol for global compliance flexibility

As a permissionless protocol, this reduces our compliance burden

Apps that sell tickets are expected to ensure regulatory compliance

Our unique lottery structure may be classified as casino 'banking' game

These have simpler compliance than lotteries, which should allow online gambling sites to easily add us

I’m incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made so far

I believe we are at our Uniswap V1 moment. 

My goal with Megapot V2 is to build a protocol that is truly permissionless and can stand the test of time, just like Uniswap v2

Even folks like Justin Drake from the Ethereum Foundation are excited about the idea of a world lottery:

Even folks like Justin Drake from the Ethereum Foundation are excited about the idea of a world lottery: https://x.com/ryanberckmans/status/1833162803609305292

We’ll also expand to user-generated lotteries tailored to every place and use case

We’ll build a lottery launchpad to enable anyone to launch a lottery with an instantly large jackpot

We can make this programmatic too. Imagine a lottery where there is a winner every $100k or where 50% of players win

Or where the ticket price is as low as $0.001, enabling apps to offer tickets freely as incentives

What if we allowed a user to get the best odds to win an exact amount 
(eg. with $2, win exactly $25k to buy a car)

All of this will be powered by the same liquidity enabling liquidity providers to earn maximum yield

We're raising our first funding round soon

This enables us to expand our team, scale to every chain while keeping the jackpot on one chain, and build a user-generated lottery launchpad

If this is interesting to you, I’d love to chat! 

Feel free to DM!

At the time, I couldn’t figure it out. 

I then spent a year hacking on protocols at night

I took the night shift when sleep training my newborn daughter. 

She woke up every 45 minutes so instead of trying to fall back asleep, I built side projects