After three years in the making, Augur has launched its mainnet and gone live.
On July 8, Augur announced via Twitter[1] that the platform's migration to its mainnet would begin on Monday at 11:01 a.m. PT, and the company's Medium page[2] estimated the process would last eight to 10 hours. Augur, three years in the making, has promised to predict the future. But for now, predictions about its own future were disappointingly indistinct: It would be live sometime tonight.
In its promotional materials, Augur is usually described as a "decentralized oracle and prediction market platform," though often it is described more bluntly as a betting platform. On it, anyone can create a question about a future outcome, whether it's "Will the Warriors win the 2019 NBA championship?" or "Will pork bellies drop to $1 per pound?" People can buy "shares" and are rewarded for correct predictions. Conversely, those who take incorrect positions lose money. (In case you'd rather have all this explained to you by a country music star, feel free to click here[3].)
Augur may exist in a legal gray area. The Supreme Court recently struck down a law barring states from legalizing gambling. However, many states will still decide to keep sports betting illegal. It's not clear, however, how exactly Augur could be stopped even if states want to, because of its decentralized, open-source design.
But Augur may offer something beyond the opportunity to gamble. It may offer an actual social good – greater accuracy of predictions of future events. It is based on the theory of the "wisdom of the crowd[4]," which postulates that any given question can be more accurately answered, on average, by asking a large number of people rather than a single
