Prediction markets have generated forecasts for a wide variety of purposes beyond elections: who will win the Academy Awards, sales of a particular product, and how bad the flu season will be. This information is useful not only to traders wishing to profit from their forecasting and information-gathering abilities, but to researchers, businesses, governments, and others. These markets have proven to be valuable for many industries.
Prediction markets are important information-aggregation tools for researchers, businesses, individuals, and governments.
The beneficiaries of speculative markets are those seeking to trade in them: firms that wish to sell stock to raise capital, bond traders who wish to buy and sell bonds for profit. For futures and options markets, the closest financial instruments to prediction markets, their hedging value to traders is commonly cited as the primary economic benefit. For example, a farmer use futures markets in their crops to hedge against the possibility of lower crop prices in the future.
While speculative markets have the added benefit of inducing people to gather information and aggregating it into prices, but now this benefit has not been a primary justification for those markets. For prediction markets, in contrast, the informational value of prices can be the primary benefit rather than the utility to the market participants. Furthermore, even in cases when hedging or speculation is the primary reason that prediction markets exist, the value of the information these markets generate can be substantial.
Stox platform was built to see how prediction markets can generate positive benefits beyond those accruing to traders.
The Stox Alpha 2.0 version was also released in November, codenamed Galton, after the renowned statistician, Sir Francis Galton. The update included the new elite Stox Cup, a competition that uses real STX tokens. Successful testing of smart contracts during the demo phase will take the Stox platform closer to a public blockchain implementation on the Ethereum network, at which point it will become a truly decentralized prediction market.
Stox innovation lies in the development of the platform capable to manage a prediction market via smart model to enhance cooperation in the token. The forecasting markets are gaining attention since they lead to an alternative market with an objective to trade the outcomes of events like financial events, elections, weather, sports and more. Market indices, telling what a general public thinking is thinking, are great opportunities for traders involved in forecasting markets, to know possibilities.
So, have you participate in the crowd? If you haven’t, join the crowd at https://app.stox.com
