Before saying any more, we want to take a moment to apologize to two teams for whom we have genuine, profound respect: Augur and Gnosis. These two projects represent the state of the art when it comes to decentralized prediction market technology, and both deserve enormous credit for the research and work they’ve done in this field. We are truly grateful for all the effort these teams have put in to get us to where we are today. But with that said, the reason that Delphi exists in the first place is that we saw a great number of opportunities for considerable improvement over both existing solutions. Exploring how to best implement and deploy these improvements ultimately formed the basis of our own architecture and approach. This means that we must necessarily spend some time criticizing these projects, if we are to fully convey the reasoning that went into our analysis and design. We intend no offense, but when we offer our assessment of these projects, we want to do so as honestly as possible at all times. We therefore apologize in advance for any perceived hostility towards these initiatives, and to the extent possible, we will make an effort to remain professional and objective in our discussions regarding them.
So why, exactly, are we building another platform for prediction markets on Ethereum? If there are already two existing projects established, both approaching the same problem but in different ways, what good will a third do?
Well, first, let’s take a look at what the market is telling us.
At the time of this writing, Gnosis is the #1 ERC20 token by market cap, and Augur is #4. Combined, these two tokens represent roughly half a billion dollars of cumulative market cap, and it is extremely early days yet. The Gnosis crowdsale was specifically designed to discourage too much demand too early in the auction, and still sold out in a matter of minutes anyway. The market is clearly expressing incredible levels of demand for Ethereum-based prediction market platforms right now. In fact, at this time, the Ethereum ecosystem appears to demand prediction market solutions above all other ERC20-compliant innovations. The signal here is obvious: the market wants this technology.
But are Augur and Gnosis really the best the world can do? We don’t think so. In fact, even though we admit that both projects have contributed meaningfully to the ongoing dialogue of this exciting frontier, we think that the community deserves more than what it has been offered so far. We have identified a number of shortcomings with both approaches, and we think that we have some better ideas of how exactly to build and support highly liquid, globally-available, decentralized prediction markets.
We won’t pretend like we’re not trying to compete with Augur and Gnosis. We are. After observing their best efforts, we are confident that we can deliver a superior solution when it comes to Ethereum prediction markets. Our whitepaper makes this case in greater detail than we could here, but we will also be publishing a few more follow-up articles in the very near future to outline exactly why we feel this way. We hope that readers appreciate why we are doing this, and don’t mistake our technical criticisms for slander. We simply want to share some of the revelations that we have had while assessing the existing solutions, open the floor for further discussion, and help to establish a better (and more realistic) understanding in the community of both the merits and shortcomings of each of these different projects.
