Do you want moon?

Do you want lambo?

HOW BADLY DO YOU WANT THAT SHIT?!

Well, it’s time to step up your crypto gambling addiction. Stop trading boring old cryptos, and start using cryptos to bet on predictions. Oh, the thrill.

In the spirit of the recent mainnet launch, we will do a review of Augur. Augur is a prediction market, not a pure gambling/betting platform, we understand (for any quick smartasses out there).

Let’s dig in….

Augur (ticker: REP)

Mid-Tier Shitcoin

Wtf is Augur?

August is a decentralized prediction market platform running on Ethereum.

Real quick...you may be asking “WTF is a prediction market?”

*gets nerd glasses*

Wtf is a prediction market?

Prediction markets have been around for hundreds of years.

A prediction market is an exchange-traded market (like shitcoins, stocks, etc) where you can trade the outcome of events.

A market can be something like, “Who will win the World Cup?”, instead of a BTC/ETH market.

Prediction markets aggregate beliefs over some unknown future outcome. Essentially, you can buy ‘yes’ or ‘no’ shares (which are really contracts), and the more you pay per share, the higher likelihood you believe the outcome to be.

You can buy contracts low, then sell them higher, just like in trading. Or, traders can decide to buy ‘shares’ of yes or no contracts (this is binary trading), and when a contract expires, you receive 0 or 100% of the value of the contract.

Bet and trade! Yay.

Wtf is Augur again?

So...Augur is a decentralized prediction market. Makes more sense now?

Augur allows for three primary actions: market creation, market trading, and the reporting of event outcomes.

Users can create markets. To do this, users need to spend some Ethereum. Let’s say you pay ETH to create a market called, “I will receive my lambo by December 31, 2018”.

As a market creator, you also set your own maker/taker fees, but Augur plans to get rid of this and only allow for a single market creator fee. Once the market closes (the event is over), the creator fee is rewarded to the market creator. Hey...maybe you can get your lambo by making intriguing markets? Get them commissions!

Now, traders can choose to buy and sell contracts, ultimately providing liquidity to your market. Shares can be worth anything between 0 and 1 ETH. There are two ways to make money as a trader. One is to buy/sell fluctuations in the market, and the other is to HODL until the contract expires and take your winnings.

Payouts are calculated as follows:

• Payout for closing a long position (you think the event WILL happen) = # of shares * price / # of ticks
• Payout for closing a short position (you think the event WILL NOT happen) = # of shares * (# of ticks - price)/ # of ticks

Ticks is the total number of prices possible between the lowest and largest price in the market.

Next, when a market closes, the result must be reports and settled. There are designated reporters with markets that submit reports, and are rewarded in REP, the Augur token. You have 27 days to make a report. There’s some other details...like, you do not need a designated reporter, anyone can report, but it’s a bit easier to have designated parties for reporting.

Ultimately, you might be asking yourself, why the f**k would I trust an independent reporter to accurately report the outcome of my markets? Well, you wouldn’t and Augur has this covered. Augur uses a decentralized oracle system to verify proposed outcomes. Any reporter can challenge a proposed outcome and submit their own. There are some additional complexities when there is a designated reporter for a market (their opinion is inherently trusted to a degree) but there are still checks and balances to ensure that all outcomes are accurate.

Who tf is behind this shit?

We remember their ICO back in 2014, which means they have been in the crypto space for a while. It’s one of the first Ethereum projects to gain ‘mass’ attention.

There’s not much to say specifically about their team...but here it is:

Jack Peterson is one of their co-founders and has a background primarily as a web developer and technician.

Their other co-founder is Joey Krug, another techie who helps with core development. He is also the Co-Chief Investment Officer at Pantera, which is some pretty huge shit and provides good connections for investments and liquidity for Augur’s prediction markets.

Oh, and Vitalik is also an advisor.

Overall, that’s Augur. Mid-Tier shitcoin because prediction markets are not necessarily as popular as traditional betting/gambling platforms, but the team does successfully hit milestones and is hustling hard. We wish them the best.

Hope you learned some shit.

Chat soon

- Mike and Aaron