Need feedback on my “trustless Ponzi” game design

Let’s start with why I created it in the first place: The Solana Memecoin craze.

My timeline is filled with pump fun gem hunting.

Everyone on CT is making 100x trades it almost seems easy.

So even though it is extremely PVP, and information bubbles exist, people still take their chances.

They desperately need to “make it” and end up being the less informed.

The problem is that they play a game they don’t fully know the rules of – those with more info pocket their losses.

The only hope left for them is to get inside the closed circles of the “well-informed” or to play a better game.

So I went to make a better game.

This game has the same potential upside, except the information gap doesn’t exist here.

You’re as well informed as the best player in the game because it’s radically transparent and there are only 6 numbers to know.

I called it the Ponzi Market and launched it on this sub 1 month ago – https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1ccok9l/i_built_a_trustless_ponzi_scheme_with_smart/

This one particular game “smol profits” got 87 total deposits.

Since the 10-hour game clock restarted with each deposit, it ran for 16 days.

The last player took .3 eth jackpot from a .003 eth deposit and ~30 other deposits doubled in the process.

However, it also pointed out some inefficiencies in the game design, which currently looks like this:

You get ROl paid by subsequent players until the game expires. The catch is that you can only withdraw after you reach the predetermined ROl threshold of up to 100% (you lose your deposit if you don’t).

But since 100% ROl is insufficient for most of us, there’s the jackpot function. It pools all the unreleased funds when the game expires and gives them to the last player to join. The catch is that every new deposit restarts the 10-hour game timer. Jackpot grows exponentially over time and creates such 100x opportunities for players.

The bottom line is that everyone’s on a level informational ground here. The only thing differentiating players is persistence and game theory knowledge. No info bubbles. Just pure fun with ETH on Arbitrum.

The problem that arose after the launch was pointed out to me by a community member called “memehunter”. He said:

“There is zero incentive to make a non-minimum deposit now. Even if you want to deposit more it’s better to make many mini-deposits. Gas fee is almost non-existent and they are gonna be filled much much faster. Just check the previous games. In smol profits 0xB851…674b made a dep of 0.02 fairly early in the game and received nothing. More than 10 0.003 were fulfilled after him. If he made 7 0.003 deps he would’ve doubled his eth easily instead of losing it all. Every deposits gets an equal share of next deposits. It’s much easier to fulfill a mindep. Basically, imagine a need for 50% roi. Mindep is 0,01, you dep 0,05, you need 0,075 to withdraw. next guy deps 0.01 and only need 0.015. You will reach 0.015 faster than him but 0.075 much much later.”

When exploring solutions he suggested:

“Maybe even allow only one size. Host can set his deposit and the size of other deposits. Make it mandatory 10x or smth. Like if host deps 0.1 eth, all other deps are 0.01”

Since the game was launched on this sub, I want your opinion again. Does it make sense to restrict it this way or should I leave it for the userbase to figure it out themselves?

I would appreciate any opinions you can share. The smart contracts – https://github.com/swagamoney/ponzi.contracts