> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://ample-2.gitbook.io/docs/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://ample-2.gitbook.io/docs/start-here/understanding-ample.md).
# Understanding Ample
### How it works
You deposit into an Ample vault. Stablecoins like USDC, or supported assets, on the chain of your choice. From that moment your money earns yield in onchain lending markets, the same way it would in any savings product.
The difference is what happens to the yield. Instead of dripping it back to you, Ample pools it with the yield from every other deposit. Once a week, that pool becomes payouts, with a Grand Prize at the top and tiers of large, medium, and smaller payouts reaching hundreds of savers.
Your deposit is **never spent, staked against anything, or put into the pool**. Win or not, it sits in the vault earning, and you can withdraw it whenever you want.
### Tickets
Your chance in each draw comes from tickets. Hold $1 in a vault for a full week and you have 100 tickets. Hold $1,000 and you have 100,000. Tickets track your average balance across the week, so depositing early counts for more than depositing the night before, and they refresh automatically every cycle. You never buy them and they never cost you anything.
Ample also rewards tenure. Holding through cycles, depositing weekly, and patience between wins all multiply your weight, up to nearly double. [Tickets](/docs/how-payouts-work/tickets.md) has the numbers.
### When you win
The draw runs and you should be able to see your claim on the app; one transaction later the payout is in your wallet, in the vault's asset (meaning, all your winnings autocompound in the vault and earns you more tickets).
### When you don't
Most weeks, most savers don't receive a payout. Your balance spent the week earning yield for the pool, your streak grew, and your luck multiplier ticked up for the next draw. What you gave up is the interest drip you would have collected in a regular account. Nothing else changes hands.
### Is this a lottery?
No. Lottery tickets are purchases. The players fund the prizes, so the crowd loses what the winner gains. On Ample nobody's money funds anything except their own balance. The pool is interest. A week without a win means your savings account paid its yield to the week's winners instead of to you, while your money stayed entirely yours.
Economists call this prize-linked savings. It has powered one of the UK's most popular savings products since 1956, and the story is told in [A Savings Idea Older Than Computers](/docs/research/history.md).
### Why people trust it
The vaults are non-custodial and audited. Your funds sit in audited smart contracts built on lending infrastructure (Euler, Morpho) with more than twenty audits behind it.
The draw is provable, every cycle publishes a cryptographic proof of its randomness and commits results onchain before anyone claims.
There are NO lockups, NO exit fees, NO waiting periods.
From here, [A Week on Ample](/docs/start-here/a-week-on-ample.md) walks through one full cycle, and [Make Your First Deposit](/docs/start-here/first-deposit.md) gets you in before the next one starts.
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