Use Cases, Technology and User Experience
What is the use case of the token?
Augur is a global and decentralized prediction market platform. Through the wisdom of the crowd outcomes of future events should be predicted precisely. Results that are currently predicted on Augur include price predictions of cryptocurrencies and stocks, winners of sport events and results of political elections. Participants may engage on the prediction market to hedge risks or for betting purposes. The token enables users to decide which outcomes are correct and provides an incentive for users to collaborate to the platform.
In order to create a prediction market a user needs to provide initial liquidity by allocating funds in the form of ETH towards an outcome. People that predict the correct outcome receive the ETH that is at stake whereas people predicting the wrong outcome do not receive anything. It is not necessary to disclose the user identity for participating in a prediction market. Augur can be compared to centralized betting platform such as bwin.com, with the difference that there is no central entity and users can create any prediction market they consider relevant.
What does the technology behind look like?
Augur is a open-source protocol that runs on the Ethereum network. It can be classified as a layer-2 blockchain solution. Augur is designed to deliver correct results on the platform through token incentives. However, if the majority of REP holders would be corrupted, the possibility of a fork exists to correct for the wrongly reported outcome. Forking is the nuclear option mentioned in the Augur white paper to ensure the integrity of the network. The higher the market capitalization of REP is, the more difficult it will be for malicious actors.
How is the User Experience?
Usage of the Augur platform requires an Ethereum wallet. The platform currently supports Metamask, Ledger, Trezor and edge. Users need to download and install an app to use the platform. Thereafter they need to connect to an Ethereum node before they can use Augur. The process is rather smooth for a cryptocurrency application, but not really easy compared to non-blockchain mainstream consumer applications. This is because the whole blockchain space is still at an early stage, and Augur can only use the infrastructure that is already available in the Ethereum ecosystem. We can expect the User experience to improve significantly in the course of the next year. Once the users engages with Augur there are four different stages: market creating, outcome shares trading, reporting and settlement.
Team & Developer Community
The Forecast Foundation is the foundation behind Augur that is responsible for the development and maintenance of the platform.
Jack Peterson is the co-founder and lead developer of Augur. He holds a PhD in Biophysics from University of California.
Joey Krug is the second co-founder of Augur and a computer science drop out. He performs at the same time a venture capital function at Pantera VC firm. Further, he is an advisor of various cryptocurrency ICO projects including Origin.
Augur counts with a large team of developers and a very active Discord channel where developers engage with each other.
Token Economics
Reputation Tokens which are called REP are the native tokens of the Augur platform. Fees for the settlement of prediction markets are paid in these tokens and users are rewarded in REP tokens for reporting or correcting outcomes. The REP token has the function to ensure honest reporting of results on the Augur platform. REP tokens can be traded and are listed on several major exchanges.
Progress History, Achievements and Road Map
The Augur ICO took place in 2015. After three years of development Augur launched the world’s first decentralized prediction market in July 2018 on the Ethereum network.
Augur is one of the few tokens that come with a product that is already live. DappRadar reports that Augur accounts for more than 1,000 weekly transactions on the Ethereum blockchain and as of August 2018 there are more than 4,000 ETH staked on the platform. This means that Augur is among the top 10 applications with the highest ETH balance on the Ethereum network. Currently there are more than 800 prediction markets active on Augur.
Community Strength
Augur counts with an active reddit community with more than 9,000 subscribers and the official Twitter account has more than 120,000 followers.
Conclusion
Augur is one of the hottest decentralized applications that run on the Ethereum blockchain. Due to the nature of the platform it seems that Augur is not affected by the limited number of transactions per second that Ethereum can perform. The fact that the project is already launched makes it more predictable for investors.
Users are cautiously adopting the platform. One of the weaknesses is that the price of ETH, which is used for staking on the platform, is very volatile. This volatility makes it harder for enterprises to hedge their risks on Augur and for individuals to place bets.
Overall the platform is performing better than many other previous ICOs since Augur could deliver a functional product. We can expect the User Experience to improve and users to slowly gain trust in the platform. Both factors are necessary for Augur to take off and reach mainstream adoption.
? URL: https://www.augur.net/
? Discord: https://discord.gg/faud6Fx
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* The information contained in this article is for education purpose only and not financial advice. Do your own research before making any investment decisions.
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