Augur – Decentralized future forecast trading

https://augur.net/

Augur is a etherium based project which combines the magic of prediction markets with the power of a decentralized network to create future forecasting trading.

The concept is similar to binary trading platforms where people place bids on future prices of commodities or stocks etc. And either you win the multiple based on the odds or you loose everything.

Augur raised $5m in 2015.Augur had its ICO and its digital token is called “REP” between August 17th till October 1st, 2015. Holders of REP have a responsibility to report on the outcomes of predictions/events that are posted on Augur. Currently the market-cap of Augur token REP  is approx  $235 million. Important to note that Augur is in alpha stage and it stays in your wallet that ” DO NOT deposit mainnet ETH or REP.”. Which means, currently you can only deposit test tokens.

There are existing companies like Nadex, which are trying to get their foot in this market. Centralized platforms like Nadex have been suffering from negative experiences of the users. Nadex has mobile and web solutions and many a times they is either buggy product or latency or a intentional glitch which causes people to loose money even when they are not suppose to loose. Not only that Nadex has a central power to enable/disable or add/remove any new assets or asset types or trade types for a user. This is the reason, why sometimes a user will see a lucrative type for binary or future trading and the next time it will be disable for the user without a reason. Not only that , since Nadex is making money out of these trades, they do sometimes create unintentional barrier for users to withdraw money from their accounts etc. These are the problems with existing binary future trading markets.

Augur is based on ethereum network. And is fully decentralized. This gives power back to users in terms of creating new types or markets for future trades, where other users can bet on.

Augur’s fees are set by the users.This balances and reduces the price overall.

You need to setup your account through a third-party wallet integration called Airbitz.

The good:

• Decentralized system with a consensus based voting definitely removes the centralized 3rd party which makes profits overs peoples bets.
• Decentralization will reduce the cost or commission paid to the centralized platform.
• Decentralized system, will definitely reduce any fraud or in appropriate practices by a central platform.
• Money/Crypto-currency can easily be added to wallet and then redistributed as an when needed with extremely fewer restrictions as compared to centralized services. like Nadex which deals with bank regulations etc.
• Since contracts are user generated, there would be more options for users to place bets on.
• The project is open sourced. Link.

The bad:

• User sign up flow is not straight forward, You can either manually sign up or through Airbitz.
• Some of the market future trade requests are illogical since they are user generated predictions. For example trades like “will bitcoin be more than or equal to 10,000$ by end of 2017” etc. You will find many of such predictions.
• The platform is still in very early stage and you cannot use real tokens yet.
• The consensus based verification might get tricky if the platform does not have considerable number of users.
• There might sometimes mediation required if consensus based system is misconstrued by the wording of the user generated contract.