Moonpot is essentially a lottery where you also earn interest when you deposit crypto onto the site. It's powered by the reputable Beefy Finance and functions on the Binance Smart Chain - so the fees to deposit your crypto won't cost you a fortune in transaction fees. Think of Moonpot as a crypto savings account that also enters you into a weekly big-money prize game.
There are currently 2 pools you can enter and once you deposit your crypto into these pots, you will immediately start earning interest on your assets every day. Depositing your assets will also enter you into the lottery - which will give you a chance at winning big money prizes. Obviously, the more you put in, the greater your odds of winning will be. So, your deposit is essentially your ticket for the prize - yet even if you do not win you will keep your deposit and earn additional interest the whole time. Therefore you do not lose anything by entering (except for transaction fees) and will always be able to get your initial deposit + interest back.
There are currently 2 pools running - one for $Cake and one for moonpots native token $Pots:
As you can see there are two lotteries/pools. 'Ziggy's Pot' (top image) is drawn once a month and requires a deposit in $Pots. Since it is only drawn once per month, the prize is running very high - it even breached a million dollars for a while. As mentioned earlier, once you deposit your $Pots into the pool, you will immediately start to earn interest on your deposit at a rate of 185.73% APY and 105.14% APR (At the time of writing). To have access to the higher APY yield - you will need to compound your interest on a daily basis which will cost some BNB fees. So it may not be worth it to compound if you only have a small bag of $Pots, but will be profitable if you own a larger bag.
As you can see in the image above, the current odds of winning the grand prize for Ziggy's Pot is 1 in 3946 per $1000 deposit. But there is no minimum deposit required so you can enter with 10 $Pots if that's more suitable for you. Once you deposit your assets, it will give you personalized odds depending on the amount you have deposited. For example, my current odds stand at about 1 in 18,000 since I don't own a massive amount of $Pots, though these are still incredible odds to win compared to a normal lottery - and especially good considering that you also earn interest the whole time.
There is also a weekly lottery/pool for $Cake holders (bottom image). Since it is a weekly draw, the prize is lower but still significant. You will also earn interest from your $Cake deposit that will earn you $Pots - which you can then deposit into Ziggy's Pot. For transparency, the devs publish the winners to all the lotteries and you can see the last $Cake pool lottery winners here. If you already have $Cake on beefy finance, it's easy to switch over and deposit it on Moonpot to get yourself a ticket.
You can pull out your deposit + added interest at any time you want, but there is a Fairplay Timelock on your deposit that runs for 10 days - the fairness fee for pulling out your funds before the 10 days will be at 2.5%. Though the 10 days timelock will start to count down the moment after your deposit, and the 2.5% will go lower for each day until it reaches 0% on the 10th day.
Are they trustworthy?
Moonpot is an open-source project that was built by the team at Beefy Finance and has been audited by Certik. Certik is a leading security auditing service for de-fi and has approved both Beefy Finance and Moonpot. Therefore, if you trust Beefy Finance you are in safe hands with Moonpot. There is also a very active and helpful discord that will help alleviate any concerns or issues that you may have - https://discord.gg/8YquFwfw3N - so feel free to join!
There is no middleman and your security is guaranteed by smart contracts - which will always allow the user to get his deposit back with no reduction in the original amount + the additional earned interest. And as mentioned, it will guarantee an entry into the lottery which will give you an opportunity to make many times over your deposit. So it's a win-win in the sense that you enter a lottery with no actual payment (outside transaction fees) while also earning interest.
The winner is also randomly selected by the smart contract - therefore the winner is chosen with no human intervention which safeguards the system against any bias or rigging. The draw is actually made by Chainlink VRF (verifiable random function), which is provably-fair and verifiable source of randomness designed for smart contracts. This process cannot be tampered with by anyone, and safeguards the randomness of the draw to give you a fair shot at winning - more details about the Chainlink VRF can be found here: https://docs.chain.link/docs/chainlink-vrf/
Risks?
As mentioned, you do not lose anything by entering into these pools outside of the fees on Binance Smart Chain while depositing your assets - around $0.70 in my experience. You will never lose your deposit and are free to withdraw at any time you want - subject to the fairness fee which runs out after 10 days. There is also no impermanent loss associated with moonpot which you would have to worry about when entering a liquidity pool. As far as de-fi goes, it seems like a very safe project that is open source and audited - so there would need to be a major exploit or a failure in BSC for your funds to be at risk.
Past and Future Prizes:
The higher your deposit, the higher your odds of winning will be. But just because your odds are smaller doesn't mean you can't win. In the first Cake pot that was drawn in July, one of the five winners won $16,000 just from staking 10 Cake. The winner gets also gets to keep his deposit and the added interest - even better, the winnings can be immediately entered into the next draw which will give increased interest and greater odds to win a future prize.
Each draw will have 5 winners for the Cake pot and 10 winners for Ziggy's Pot, with the winning equally distributed among them. That means that there could be $100,000 in crypto distributed to 10 lucky winners when Ziggy's Pot is drawn.
Let's Get Started:
So, to get started and give yourself a chance to win the lottery and earn interest - go to https://play.moonpot.com/#/
To get yourself some $Pots, head over to Pancake Swap and swap some BNB or Cake for the asset. Or to enter the Cake pot, buy some on an exchange and send the assets over to your MetaMask account (or another hot wallet).
Then simply connect your wallet to Moonpot and deposit your crypto, which enters the lottery for you automatically!
Good luck!
