How your money is protected
Where your money sleeps, and why it wakes up whole
Windfall's promise is simple: your savings are never in the prize pool. Only the interest plays. This page explains exactly what stands behind that promise — and, because you deserve a straight answer, what could still go wrong.
Every dollar you deposit is held in funds that own short-term U.S. Treasury bills — the asset the entire financial world treats as its benchmark for safety. Your principal is redeemable in full, any time. 100% of the interest those T-bills earn goes to the monthly prize pool. Prizes go up and down with interest rates; your balance never does.
We deliberately avoid the phrase "risk-free." Nothing that pays yield is perfectly risk-free, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What we can show you is that Windfall's design puts your money at the very bottom of the risk ladder — the same place governments, central banks, and money-market funds put theirs — and keeps every layer of it inspectable.
The journey of a dollar
Here is everything that happens to $100 after you deposit it. No step is hidden, and no step lends your money to anyone except the U.S. government.
The ~$4 of interest → becomes prize money, and your $100 of balance becomes tickets in every monthly draw.
Why T-bills are the benchmark for "safe"
A U.S. Treasury bill is a short-term IOU from the United States government — the most widely held, most liquid, most scrutinized financial asset on Earth. When professionals measure the risk of anything else, T-bills are the ruler they measure against; finance textbooks literally call their yield "the risk-free rate," because it is the closest thing to it that has ever existed.
- Backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. In over two centuries, the U.S. has never failed to pay a T-bill.
- Short-term by design. Bills mature in weeks or months, so their value barely moves when markets panic — this is where money runs to in a crisis.
- What careful money already holds. Banks, insurers, central banks, and the money-market funds where corporations park payroll all sit in the same asset.
This is the core difference between Windfall and earlier "no-loss" experiments like PoolTogether: their yield came from crypto lending markets, which meant real lending risk hiding behind the "no-loss" label. Windfall's yield comes from the U.S. Treasury. Same prize mechanic — an entirely different foundation under it.
The risk ladder
Every way to hold money sits somewhere on a ladder of risk. Windfall's design goal is simple: live on the bottom rung.
Bar length = rough relative risk to principal. Illustrative, not a quantitative model.
Note the fourth rung: this is why Windfall prefers holding tokenized fund shares directly rather than sitting in one issuer's stablecoin. Your claim is on a regulated fund full of government debt — not on any single company's promise to stay solvent. Stablecoins are used as plumbing, briefly, not as the vault.
Windfall vs. the alternatives
| Lottery ticket | Local bank savings | DeFi "no-loss" (2019-era) | Windfall | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Can you get your money back? | No — spent | Yes | Yes | Yes — instantly, 1:1 |
| What backs the balance | Nothing | Bank's loan book, local currency | Crypto lending pools | U.S. Treasury bills via regulated funds |
| Keeps value against inflation | — | Often loses 30%+/yr in target markets | Dollar-based | Dollar-based |
| Chance to win big | Yes, by losing the stake | No | Yes | Yes — funded by interest only |
| Draw fairness | Trust the operator | — | Verifiable on-chain | Verifiable on-chain randomness, checkable by anyone |
When interest rates move, what changes?
One thing, and only one thing: prize sizes. The prize pool is whatever the T-bills earn. Drag the rate below and watch which numbers move — and which one never does.
Illustrative math only (rate × pool size, before the small transparent management fee). If rates fall toward 1%, prizes shrink — that's the honest trade-off of interest-funded prizes, and it's why the prize schedule leans on many small monthly wins, not just one jackpot.
What could still go wrong — said plainly
A safety page that lists no risks is a marketing page. These are the four real ones, each with what Windfall does about it. They appear in every pitch we make, on purpose.
1. Reserve & plumbing risk ("depeg")
Your money is only as safe as the vehicles holding it. A tokenized fund's administrator, or a stablecoin used in transit, could fail operationally.
What we do: hold regulated T-bill fund shares directly instead of parking in any single issuer's stablecoin; spread across multiple funds; publish the full reserve composition on a public dashboard, updated continuously.
2. Falling interest rates
If the Fed cuts rates to ~1%, the prize pool shrinks to roughly a quarter of its size at 4%. Principal is untouched, but the game gets less exciting.
What we do: design the prize schedule around thousands of small monthly wins and group play, which keep saving fun even in low-rate years. We never top up prizes by dipping into anyone's balance.
3. Regulation
Prize-linked savings sits near gambling, lottery, and securities law, and every country draws those lines differently. Getting this wrong can shut a product down.
What we do: launch only in markets where local counsel has cleared the structure, follow the licensed-custody route in each one, and never launch on a legal grey area to move faster.
4. Trust — ours to earn
Our target savers have been burned by scams before. A promise of safety from a new app is worth exactly nothing on day one.
What we do: licensed custodians, published audits, provably fair draws anyone can verify on-chain, and a payout track record built one month at a time. Trust is the product; this page is part of it.
The honest summary: Windfall removes the risks that killed earlier attempts — lending risk, hidden reserves, unverifiable draws — and pins what remains to the credit of the U.S. government. That's not "zero risk." It's the least risk available anywhere in the world for money that wants a chance to win.
Quick questions
If I never win, have I lost anything?
Not from your balance — every deposited dollar remains yours. What you give up is the interest your money would have earned in a regular dollar money-market account (roughly $4/year per $100 at recent rates). That forgone interest is the price of your tickets. Compared to a local account losing 30%+ to inflation, most of our savers come out far ahead even without a single win.
Can Windfall spend my deposit on prizes?
No. The separation isn't a policy — it's enforced by the vault code, which only ever moves the amount above total deposits to the prize pool. That code is open source and audited, and the reserve dashboard lets anyone check assets against balances at any moment.
How do I know the draw isn't rigged?
Winners are picked using verifiable on-chain randomness (Chainlink VRF-class): a random number that is generated publicly, can't be predicted, and can't be chosen by us — plus a selection formula anyone can re-run to confirm the result.
What happens if Windfall the company disappears?
Customer assets live in regulated funds with licensed custodians, segregated from company money. The company failing would be a terrible day for us — not a loss of your principal. Exact custody structure per market is published in that market's disclosures.