Growth Pool

As was noted in Protocol Revenue, 2% of all funds paid out from resolved scenario pools will be directed to a protocol growth pool. The purpose of funds in the growth pool will be to allow for a future in which free notifications are possible. Free notifications will not be made available initially, but are likely to be important in ultimately providing the type of optionality and user experience that will allow the protocol to scale to a large retail user base.

Once the growth pool reaches a certain size (or when protocol adoption is deemed by the founding team to be at a suitable level), a ‘free pool’ option will be switched on and made available to asker-makers. Free pools will mean that anyone can create a pool (or join ‘free pools’) without needing to pay a fee, with the incentive for confirmers to resolve the pool and trigger a notification coming instead from the funds in the growth pool.

It is expected that relative to standard pools, the rewards for acting as a confirmer and resolving a free pool will be modest; for this reason, askers who create or join free pools will be aware that they may receive a lower level of service, potentially with less guarantees of notification receipt. However, in time, the growth pool may develop to a level that makes it a powerful asset for the protocol.

In its early phases, the founding team will explore ways to ensure that funds in the growth pool are productive and yield-bearing by deploying them in low-risk DeFi protocols. Automated conversion to staked ETH (in the form of liquid staking tokens) will also be an option for the longer-term use of funds in the growth pool. Additionally, as noted in Tokenomics, the growth pool will be bolstered by receiving 50% of any slashed SNR for the life of the protocol.

To ensure that the growth pool is never fully depleted, free scenario pools will only be able to receive a predetermined percentage of the available funds in the growth pool for each instance of pool resolution. Whilst this will necessarily mean a smaller pay-out to confirmers (especially initially), as long as the pay-out for acting as a confirmer is larger than the gas cost of doing so, an incentive will still exist for free pools to be resolved and notifications to be sent to askers.