How to get a Base wallet and claim your winnings as a DigiByte miner

PotPool is a 0% fee DigiByte pool. Its block rewards buy Megapot lottery tickets once a day, and winnings are paid in USDC on Base. For a miner who has only worked with BTC and its forks, the chain part is the unfamiliar bit. This is what you need to know.

Mining needs an address, not a wallet

Set your worker name to 0xYourAddress.rig1, point the rig at the pool and you are mining. The pool does not need ETH or a deposit. Winnings can only be claimed by the address in the username, so use one you can open.

EVM and Base in two paragraphs

The EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) is the shared computer that Ethereum and its sibling chains run smart contracts on. PotPool's payout contract is one of those programs.

Base is a layer 2 built on Ethereum. It bundles many transactions into one and posts that to Ethereum, like a bus lane on the same highway. Fees stay at a few cents and confirmation is fast, and the result still ends up on Ethereum. So almost any wallet that supports Ethereum also supports Base, and the address is the same 0x… string. The same address also works on other EVM chains such as Arbitrum, Optimism and Polygon.

Pick a wallet

Three wallets I can point you to. Each has a plain link and a referral link:

• MetaMask: plain link or referral link
• Zerion: plain link or referral link
• Coinbase Wallet: plain link or referral link

The referral links may earn me a reward and cost you nothing. The plain links earn me nothing. Rainbow, Rabby and plenty more work just as well. Create one, copy the address and keep the recovery phrase offline. Use a wallet you control, not an exchange deposit address.

Why claiming costs a little ETH

Claiming is a transaction on Base, so it needs a few cents of ETH for gas. The network requires it, and the fee goes to the network, not to me or the pool.

It looks like the classic scam, but a scam asks you to send money to someone before they release your winnings. Gas is paid by your own wallet when you sign the claim. It works like the fee you pay to send BTC, or like paying for gas to go on a trip in a car you already own.

The contract checks your claim against a Merkle proof, so only the winning address can pull its share, and only once. A second claim on the same round is rejected.

Claim from the round page and nowhere else, and never send ETH or USDC to anyone who messages you about your winnings. I will never ask for that.

Is the contract safe to read?

The contract is immutable by design. If I find a bug, I deploy a new contract and retire the old one. Basescan is linked from every round page. Round 1's contract is the one exception: its source isn't verified, so it shows as raw bytecode instead of readable code.

If you have no ETH on Base yet, wait until a round shows winnings for your address, then buy or bridge a few dollars of ETH on Base and claim. Do it within 14 days: unclaimed USDC goes back into later ticket buys.

Links

• The original post: https://potpool.party/blog/new-to-the-chain-thing
• The X article: https://x.com/Mobilpadde/status/2115778678869155852
• How it works: https://potpool.party/how-it-works
• Past rounds: https://potpool.party/rounds
• Telegram: https://t.me/potpoolparty

It's a lottery, so most tickets win little or nothing.

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Not financial advice 🫠