As many of you know, we’ve been working on Pools for a while now in a bid to vastly upgrade the gameplay experience, greatly reduce gas costs, and add a lot of additional functionality and utility - and we’re proud to announce that the audit for the Pools functionality has just been successfully completed with @SourceHatLabs!

You can find the full audit report here: Audit Report

What are Inscription Pools?

A Pool is a contract in which Truffi holders can freely create Pools of 50 inscriptions at a time at any given, self-selected rarity level. The purpose of this is to essentially allow holders to act as “mini-exchanges” and providers of liquidity all on their own, while earning a passive income through tiny pool fees paid by players and accumulated over time.

In exchange, the community members competing in events can visit a pool through Shuffling and then claim any Truffi they require it while returning an equivalent amount of tokens plus a small fee back into the pool, all for much less than the previous Generate mechanism would have cost.

Why Pools?

In our previous iterations, we used a Generate mechanism to re-roll your inscriptions on-chain. The contract combined your Truffies, turned them into one dynamic inscription, and then split them into stable inscriptions according to the level you selected.

While this approach is still available on both truffi.xyz and fungibles.xyz and still very much has a place in the meta and the gameplay flow for now, this presented us with potentially disadvantageous circumstances in the form of high ETH gas fees on Base during periods of peak activity or fast ETH price appreciation, leaving our holders in a difficult position of having to count their gas and weigh it vs. rewards, instead of just enjoying their Truffi collecting experience.

To address this, we implemented Shuffle - a function which takes you from one pool to another at the click of a button, for practically no fees at all. Put simply, if Generate was buying a mystery box full of surprises for a fixed price, Shuffle is window-shopping practically free of charge and selecting only what you truly want or need.

This is not however where the utility for pools ends!

Pools have plenty of other uses and benefits, such as:

• They provide real token utility by allowing users to pool their Truffies and earn fees in ETH, and incentivize pool owners to cumulatively lock away large portions of the total supply for passive income in a form of pseudo-staking.
• They afford a very low barrier to entry, and even the playing field by allowing players with smaller holdings the ability to still pick from a pool of higher level Truffies.
  For example: in Generate, you would have needed 50 * 3025 tokens (roughly 1% of the supply) to generate the maximum number of Level 5 inscriptions with the highest chance of rare traits, but with Shuffle and pools you will only need 3050 tokens (roughly 0.02% of the supply) total, a reduction of -98%.
  We do anticipate that this will reduce demand from players to a degree, but at the same time we believe that the demand from pool operators earning passive income - in conjunction with a rising number of players over time - will far outweigh it.
• As mentioned, pooling is far more efficient: it allows you to select only what you need out of a pool rather than generate a large number of inscriptions and hope for the best. Once everyone has taken what they need out of a pool, the pool owner can easily re-generate a pool to allow a fresh batch of Truffies to be available to players yet again - and we anticipate that doing this may prove profitable for pool owners, who will be incentivized through pool fees to spend their own gas on re-generation of pools singularly, rather than have 30-50 people do it separately.
• Better UX in this area as well once direct actions like collecting and listing on market directly from pools are implemented, without having to put Truffies into your inventory first. This will end the rare issue that some players have encountered where their Truffies get re-rolled if put into a wallet containing an inscription with an identical number of tokens.

Shuffling

Out of all the above-mentioned benefits of shuffling, the greatest one is very easy to spot, and has indeed been spotted and commented on by our players already: it is incredibly affordable.

Generate isn’t particularly costly in its own right on Base, but Shuffle is another 100 times cheaper, so in most circumstances it will be practically free.

Players cannot pre-select a pool they’d like to join as a collector: when pressing Shuffle, they will send a transaction to the pools contact which will in turn give them a permit to exchange with one of the many available pools at random.

The element of randomness exists for obvious reasons: to prevent unfair camping by some players in certain pools they like for competitive reasons, prevent pool owners from being able to cooperate with their friends in their own pools, and to encourage players to seek out Truffies in true truffle-hunter style by Shuffling more and covering more ground.

Shuffling will begin to truly shine and outperform generate in the vast majority of instances once we have implemented some additional infrastructure we’re planning on adding to pools.

Creating Pools

To create a pool, you can head to the Pools section of app.truffi.xyz, and click on the “Create a Pool” button at the bottom of the page.

The higher the level of a created pool, the more likely it is to contain highly sought after inscriptions with rarer traits, which in turn means that the players are more likely to exchange from this pool and pool operators more likely to earn from it through greater exchange fee volume.

When a player finds a Truffi they need in a pool, they send a transaction which collects it from the pool contract: this earns the pool owner a fee in ETH. This fee, set by the Truffi team, applies globally and equally to every pool in existence, with a possible range of values from 0 ETH to 0.001 ETH hardcoded into the contract.

The target fee once the Pools function is launched fully will be 0.000002 ETH which is approximately $0.01 at the time of writing, but this fee will be raised once direct and free collection from Pools has been implemented (in contrast to the current functionality of stashing into inventory and only collecting from your own inventory).

This will incentivize pool owners to keep their supply locked and refreshed regularly, while still being more even affordable for players than the already affordable amount it is right now.

Pool maintenance

In order to increase exchange volume, the pool owners can refresh all inscriptions in their pools through this simple interface, by clicking on the “Manage” button for their pool and using the “Refresh Inscriptions” dialogue:

This re-generates the Truffies inside that pool and enables players to draw those freshly generated inscriptions, raising their likelihood of finding needed ones.