Following great delays and great fanfare, Augur’s decentralized prediction market has launched. One week on, an examination of the sort of wagers it’s attracted shows the ways in which the Ethereum-based project can be harnessed as well as the potential hazards. How decentralized is Augur and, if push came to shove, could the platform prove that it is truly censorship resistant? The fate of Augur may hinge on the outrageousness of the predictions its users place.
Also read: Want to Develop Bitcoin Cash Apps? Bitcoin.com Has You Covered
The Market That Was Three Years in the Making
Long before the ICO meme hit peak velocity, there was Augur. The project held its crowdsale back in 2015, raising $5 million, a figure that looks modest by today’s standards. Tokens were issued at $0.6 apiece, which is a snip given their current price of $29 – and Augur’s native REP token has reached more than twice that price at its peak. Building a decentralized prediction market powered by smart contracts is as difficult as it sounds. Even so, no one expected it to take until mid 2018 for Augur to launch.
As of last week, Augur has been live, enabling the masses to post predictions and to sell shares in the outcome of the event coming to pass. The higher the price of the share, the likelier the particular outcome is. Officially, Augur relies on the wisdom of the crowd. Unofficially, it’s a form of unlicensed gambling. The legality of Augur and its ability to circumvent censorship has become a hot topic. Should the US, where the project is based, take exception to the nature of its business model or to the iniquity of certain predictions, it could pressure the founders into winding up their operations. While there’s
