Augur

Augur is creating a decentralized open-source prediction market platform and oracle service. The project was founded in 2014 and released an alpha version of the platform in June 2015. Due to issues with the Serpent language, which pre-dated Solidity, the team had to re-write their code in Solidity leading to a delay in development. Augur launched their beta in March 2016 and mainnet in July 2018.

Prediction markets on the platform will enable users to create a market for forecasting a specific future event, such as who will win the next election or which team will win the World Cup. Participants in the market will be able to buy “shares” of the specific outcome they see as most likely. At the end of a pre-determined period the outcome is checked and those that own shares in the correct result receive a monetary reward. Prediction markets can be useful tools in tracking the true sentiment for results, as typically only the most informed individuals will risk money when making a prediction.

The team believes that by creating a fully decentralized prediction market they can overcome issues seen in centralized markets such as needing to trust that a result is correctly reported and that a payout is received. In addition, by creating a framework for the creation of these markets users can forecast the outcome of almost any event. Once a market is created trading begins immediately. The outcome of the event is determined by Augur’s oracles which are incentivized to report on event outcomes. Upon determination of the outcome, traders can close their positions and collect their payouts.