Augur (REP): Blockchain Prediction Market & Cryptocurrency Coin Uses?

About The Augur (REP) Project

The Augur network is a blockchain-based “decentralized oracle and prediction market platform,” where users feed real-time information into Augur's contracts and predict outcomes.

Essentially a hybrid digitized bookmaker, Augur maintains the accuracy of the information by incentivizing the process for REP (the Augur currency symbol) token holders to correct markets they feel have been incorrectly portrayed. As opposed to the traditional “taking” of odds, punters can now view those odds informed by real-time reporting. Not only that, but users can create their own markets for wagers, foreseeable on any event on earth with a start and end time.

Platform users can participate in Augur in a number of ways. They can create prediction markets, trade shares in markets and contribute to the reporting system “to keep the Augur oracle honest.”

Like a giant prediction game with side apps, market creators on Augur determine event start and end times, they nominate a reporter, a resolution source and a settlement fee, just like a bookie offering odds. Traders can then purchase shares (place a wager) in the generated Augur market immediately after its emergence.

The system of Augur contracts generate an order book for every market thus created, and generates share offers at the prevailing top price. The settlement fees are then paid out by traders when positions shift within a market. Importantly, post the market closure, the designated reporter determines fair outcomes, as vetted by Augur’s background decentralized oracle.

Any Reputation (REP) token holder is eligible to participate in Augur’s reporting system. REP holders also have the option to dispute the initial outcome of any Augur market within seven days, by lodging a “dispute bond.” Should a user do so, the relevant Augur market commences a dispute round, where users can wager REP tokens on one of the market’s possible outcomes.

If the initial market conclusion is overturned, users who correctly predicted the new outcome are rewarded with 50 percent ROI. With such a high incentive, initial market creation and subsequent reporting is streamlined to produce honest, reliable data and outcomes.

Why Choose Augur (REP)?

Augur is truly decentralized, employing Ethereum blockchain contracts and avoiding central servers. Very much like a bookmaker’s offer, users can create any prediction market on Augur. With no limitations on the types of markets users can create, the potential for a highly populated and dynamic marketplace is enabled and, unlike competitors like PredictIt or Betfair, protocols are at play to ensure wholesale transparency and legitimate, real-world outcomes.

This distributed reporting with a financial incentive is a key difference of the Augur platform and one of the main reasons users give for participation. By optimizing transparency and user abilities to actively generate and partake, Augur is trading on the emergence of a new model in bookmaking that sees users in far more control of things from the outset.

Speedy automated payouts are another seamless feature of the platform. When a position is settled, the Augur contracts system pays out immediately. The company has a global reach and no one is precluded from generating a legitimate market offer on the network.

In the very competitive online prediction game arena, Augur has simplified market creation and wagering and although a highly sophisticated build sits behind their offer, the appropriate enjoyment of the basic utility of the platform, Ethereum token support as well as payment protocols position it as an easy to use, simple yet elegant home for millions of potential punters.

The Augur Team

In the highly sophisticated arena of prediction gaming, a comprehensive Forecast Foundation team sits behind the Augur project. The co-founder and lead developer is Jack Peterson. He is aided by co-founder and senior developer Alex Chapman. Aaron drake (Senior Back-End Developer), Scott Bigelow, Serena Randolph, John Danz, Justin Barry, Phoebe Mirman, Paul Gebheim and Tom Haile. Other contributors are Peter Hicks, Matt Bullock, Austin Williams, Tom Kysar, Steph Alexander, Perry Despeignes and Ivan Petric.

Advisors include the Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, Ron Bernstein, Joe Costello, Dr. Robin Hanson, Dr. be Othman, Houman Shadab and Elizabeth Stark, the Lightning Labs CEO.

A hint of the detailed build behind Augur is glimpsed in the company’s short but intense white paper, and no download is necessary for users who wish to test the application at the outset. The platform is available at https://app.augur.net, and as is typical in meeting the demands of industry users, no installation is necessary to commence activity on the platform.

Augur (REP) Conclusion

Any decent service offering in the online gaming arena is likely to become profitable, as hundreds of billions of dollars are shed annually in the official markets, with many observers’ educated guesses at off-radar gaming being several hundred billion dollars more each year.

The Augur platform offers the simplest ease of use – log on and get going – along with maintaining the community expectations of informed, swift wagering, uncapped prospective markets and immediate and prompt payouts. That the bookmaking itself has been removed from the hands of closed third parties and that markets are generated, informed and bet upon by users is all enabled by blockchain technology’s fundamental construct.

The Augur Bounty Program provides for public bounties to be paid to those who alert the company to vulnerabilities and bugs. This bounty program runs on a points system, with one point = $1. The payouts are weighted in terms of severity, calculated by the company using the OWASP risk rating model, factoring in both likelihood and impact. System bugs already identified won’t afford whistle blowers any remuneration. If a system issue has been publicly disclosed or even already exploited on the main Ethereum network, it doesn’t qualify as a bounty issue.

The company has enjoyed heavyweight promotion and good uptake since inception, and with online gaming growing year on year and the Augur platform an elegantly simple offering to the gaming community, it is poised to secure a sizeable and profitable percentage of online punters.