As I've been digging through some crypto-related articles today, I came across Fomo3D. It's not brand new (been around for slightly more than 3 weeks), but still looks very active and is supposedly responsible for the majority of the current transactions on Ethereum.

What is Fomo3D?

So how does it work? It effectively is a ponzi scheme, where everyone is making money as long as more people are coming in and investing money, or, in this case, ETH. I don't really now why it's called "3D", but it effectively works like this:

1. People put ETH into a smart contract (they call it "buy keys")
2. There's a timer that runs down from 24h to 0.
3. If it reaches 0, roughly half of the pot is being paid out to the address that has bought the last key before the timer runs out
4. Every key purchase increases the timer by 30 seconds
5. With every key purchase, the key price goes up a tiny little bit
6. A share of the ETH spent and of the total pool is distributed to all players based on some sligthly more complex formulas

The remaining ETH goes to the makers of this "game" and to holders of P3D shares, which is another ponzi scheme on it's own.

A success story

Not only does this system cause a lot of traffic on the Ethereum main net (although gas price is still nice and low), but also there's a massive amount of ETH already locked in:

• Over 21k ETH in the Fomo3D contract
• More than 61k ETH in the P3D shares contract

Wow, that is a lot of ETH for a game you know can't make you richer on average. That's why I wanted to try it out.

Just, why??

So if this is such an obvious ponzi scheme, why would you want to join this?

It's actually a well-designed game and pretty addictive. Plus, if the hype last for a little longer (that is, a little longer after you joined), then you can actually make some decent money. How much that can be, I can let you know once I've had it running for a couple of days.

Right now it looks pretty stable. The pot is rich, and the timer is very consistently at the maximum of 24h. One of two effects will probably put an end to this. Either

• the price for the keys goes up a lot so less and less people buy because they don't expect a positive ROI any more
  or
• the gas price goes up severely so that buying a key (which uses up over 300000 gas) becomes expensive that way

If you want to try out the game, feel free to use my affiliate link for Fomo3D or for the "exchange" to buy and sell P3D token. However, make sure you have Metamask installed and enough ETH for gas (e.g. registering a username needs over 1,000,000 gas - but you don't need a username) and obviously to play ;-)

Have fun, and share your experience in the comments.

P.S: There's been some discussion about security weaknesses and other issues which you can find on Reddit