Collection pools
The idea
Today a pool is collection-agnostic by default: any whitelisted collection can be listed into it, and a pull can return anything in the pool. That is the right shape for a general marketplace, and the wrong shape for a collector.
A collection pool is a pool whose whitelist contains exactly one collection. Every position in it is from the same set, so a pull is no longer "some NFT from the pool" — it is "one card from this set, at odds you can read off the pool before you pay".
That turns the gacha from a mixed grab bag into something much closer to opening a pack.
The concrete example
A Collector Crypt Pokémon-only pool: physical Pokémon cards, vaulted and tokenised, listed exclusively into a pool that admits nothing else.
The dynamics that make Ripstr work map onto graded cards unusually cleanly:
- Backing is a public reserve price. A depositor listing a card backs it at what they would accept for it. That number is visible, and it is what the purchaser can hand the card back for.
- Inverse weighting encodes rarity honestly. A card backed at 20 SOL is drawn 2000× less often than one backed at 0.01 SOL. The pool's odds table is its rarity chart, and it is derived from what depositors actually believe their cards are worth — not from an issuer's declared pull rates.
- The price is the harmonic mean of the set. Pack price falls out of what is in the pool, and drops as commons are listed and rises as they are drawn out.
- Settlement gives the purchaser a real out. Drew a card you do not want? Hand it back for 85% of its backing instead of holding an asset you did not choose.
Available today
The per-pool collection whitelist is enforced on-chain, a pool can be created with its collections already populated, and blocking is sticky so a curated pool cannot be quietly diluted. Anyone can create a pool restricted to a single collection — see Create a pool.
Not yet available
The curated experience around it — collection-pool discovery, set-aware presentation, a pack-opening flow built for a known collection, and partnerships with vaulting providers — is not yet available, and no release date is announced.
Related
- Collections — how whitelisting and blocking work today.
- Create a pool — deploying a pool with a whitelist at creation.
- Positions & weighting — why odds fall out of backing.