Ethereum Dapps: Great Ideas Rendered Unusable by Fees

By justGreg | justCrypto | 29 Apr 2021

Fees, Fees, and more Fees

I recently discovered the Ethereum Dapp PoolTogether.

PoolTogether is a "no loss lottery" where users funds are pooled together (get the pun) and interested is collected. For each whole coin added you get 1 ticket and your odds are based on your tickets vs the number of tickets in the pool. So the more money you add, the higher your odds of winning. At the end of every week, a pooling user is randomly selected and the interest is awarded to said lotto winner.

The current DAI pool prize is a whopping $79,000+.

e8371dabce13ec5fb623eb6899ab5061e563ee03a4f050140beabe5e03696be5.png

I loved the idea and wanted to take part. The following is my first journey into the world of Dapps:

Out of simplicity and since i'm new to Dapps, I loaded up Coinbase.

I decided to buy some DAI Stablecoin. I figured at the worst, its pegged to the dollar and gains interest. Here came the first Coinbase fee of $2.99.

Next I needed to get the DAI off the Coinbase exchange and to my Coinbase wallet. This incurred a miner fee of $2.7.

Once at my Coinbase wallet, I was able to connect to PoolTogether. In order to connect to PoolTogether, you need ETH to process the contract. This incurred another $2.7 miner fee to bring some ETH over my Coinbase Wallet.

PoolTogether contract confirmation to "Allow DAI" charged another $4.

Thinking I was done and could finally deposit my DAI, another fee appeared for the final deposit that was a deal breaker, 0.025 ETH, $55+ to transfer DAI into PoolTogether.

So that's it, that's where I have left off, in a weird limbo because I would essentially be paying over 50% of what I intended to deposit just in fees, which I am sure I would also incur if I tried to remove my funds.

I hope the fee issue can get resolved as the current state of Dapps has really rendered the idea of them unusable in my opinion!