DarpalRating interviewed Delphy founder Bo Wang and Fox Holt, VP Business Development, Delphy

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Delphy

7 min readMar 21, 2018

Leading Chinese block-chain projects rating agency, DarpalRating interviewed Delphy Founder Bo Wang and VP of Business Development, Fox Holt. The interview took place in Beijing, China in January 2018 and discussed various topics, namely-

Where did Delphy project come from?

Please refer to another blog “The Story of My relationship with the Blockchain” — summary of Bo Wang’s presentation at Beijing meetup. This blog describes Delphy founder Bo Wang’s journey in the blockchain space.

Introduction of Management team.
Introduction of Factom, which was co-founded by Bo Wang.

Why blockchain plays a vital role in prediction markets?

First, prediction markets existed before the blockchain. In the United States, there were many prediction markets, one of the most famous prediction markets was Intrade. Primarily, Intrade focused on U.S. presidential elections and predictions based on the stock market transactions. In fact, from 2004 to 2012, Intrade’s predictions on the US presidential election were very accurate.

This concept was further accepted by big companies like Google, GE, Hewlett-Packard, etc., that began making decisions through prediction markets. Essentially, it is well accepted that the prediction markets have great value for democratic decision-making, information exploration, and intelligence sharing.

However, centralized implementations have resulted in fundamental shortcoming — a lack of trust amongst the exchanges, traders and government entities. The peer-to-peer blockchain technology can store all trading data on an immutable public blockchain, which demonstrates fair, accurate and tamper-proof prediction results.

Can prediction results really reflect participants’ real thoughts?

A key feature of prediction markets is to provide financial incentives to well-informed participants to share their wisdom regarding the potential outcome of upcoming events. As a result, when their predictions are accurate they are financially rewarded.

What’s the difference between Delphy and other prediction market projects, like Augur, Gnosis, etc？

Undoubtedly, Augur is the first prediction markets project to be built on blockchain. Augur issued REP token, which will provide a fully decentralized Oracle mechanism for prediction results, by asking the REP holder to vote for the results. However, it’s been over 2 years since their ICO and Augur still doesn’t even have a roadmap of when they are going to launch their platform.

Gnosis had its ICO early last year. But the GNO token which was issued is mainly for crowdfunding purpose, rather than to utilize the token. Gnosis has a very big blueprint, including wallet, exchange, etc. Like Augur, they don’t have any solid plan on their product launch.

For Delphy, from the very beginning, we know that our strategy is to launch the product. We plan to have cryptocurrency related prediction markets first, then we may extend to other categories, like sports, entertainment, etc. The initial product launch will be in the China market, then Southeast Asia, lastly English-speaking international markets.

Delphy plans to provide the best user interface and user experience, that will enable many users to take advantage of the wisdom of crowd. At this point, we have over 200,000 pre-registers to our platform. We have commenced the invitation-only internal testing by inviting our engaged community members to help us with bug-finding and UI/UX improvement.

Delphy has established the partnership with imToken, a wallet company with over 500,000 users, Cointime.com (also known as Jinse Finance), THE most influential blockchain based media platforms in China, with over 120,000 UV and over 500,000 PV daily in average. Delphy is also working to build partnership with exchanges. All of the wallet companies, media and exchanges can bring their existing users from their platforms to Delphy’s prediction markets, and on the other hand, more people can take advantage of the wisdom of crowd. It’s worth mentioning that although Delphy’s initial product launch is to China market, Chinese participants’ view on the crypto world is very important to international community. Whilst in the beginning our international community cannot participant in the predictions, but they still can benefit from the results.

What’s the current product update?

Delphy is currently in an invitation-only internal testing stage. We invited community members to make predictions on our platform, and they are providing us with valuable feedback. We also plan to invite blockchain influencers to open sessions on Delphy’s platform, essentially they can initiate their own predictive topics and have their followers participate in the prediction markets. We are also thinking of inviting third-party vertical platforms, that have existing user base, to create prediction markets that their users are most interested to participate.

How do you compare Delphy and Bodhi?

Delphy is the first prediction markets platform on the blockchain in China. Delphy is built on Ethereum, whereas Bodhi is built on the Qtum blockchain. It is well known fact that, Ethereum is more well-developed than Qtum.

Another big difference is that Delphy’s goal is to deliver the roadmap we promised to our community, for which we are working very hard towards our product launch. Additionally, Delphy’s prediction markets platform will be easy to access, fun to participate, provide market incentives and low transaction fees that will guarantee easy of use and motivate users to actively participate in making predictions. We are very confident that we can do a great job!

What’s the difference between prediction markets and betting?

This question has been asked many times. Prediction markets is absolutely not gambling.

Delphy will provide a platform on which anyone can initiate a prediction market at any time. The market is open and transparent. He/she can invite friends to make predictions, share information and benefit from the wisdom of crowd.

In fact, a prediction market is a judgment on probability. We are making judgments all the time in our lives. These judgments are basically based on probability. A lot of times, we don’t even realize that we are actually making judgments based on the probability. However, on the other hand, we can’t call all judgments based on the probability betting.

To make a prediction based on probability is essentially an objective of fact. The whole world needs prediction markets. In order to fully legitimize the prediction markets, there were more than 20 scientists in the United States (including 4 Nobel laureates) who jointly wrote to the US Congress, because prediction markets can help with making correct decision, or take corresponding actions based on the prediction results. Currently, many large companies in the United States are using prediction markets to help gather opinions internally, then make wise decisions that will have a positive impact on ROI (Return on investment).

China is in the process of internationalization, and a lot of Chinese citizens have great access to the outside world. If by using prediction markets, their wisdom could be collected, I believe it will help with the government’s decision-making. Therefore, prediction market itself can bring tremendous value to the whole society.

On the other hand, on Delphy’s platform, we have limitation on the number and amount of users’ transactions. And the buying and selling prices are also placed between 0 and 1, at a relatively low range. All of these will ensure the prediction markets become a mechanism for information discovery and wisdom sharing, rather than being manipulated as a mechanism for betting.

In general, prediction market is a very good information discovery mechanism with social value.

For details of this interview, please refer to ：《【大炮专访】天算汪波：拒绝民意操纵，预测市场让群体智慧有价值》

Thank you for your continued support!

About Delphy

A Decentralized mobile social platform for prediction markets.

Delphy is a decentralized, mobile prediction market platform built on Ethereum. The Delphy App is a light Ethereum node running on mobile devices.

Delphy uses market incentives to allow participants in a market to communicate, instantly and transparently, their wisdom regarding the outcome of upcoming events, effectively predicting the future. We design Delphy from the start to be decentralized, which makes it difficult to manipulate prediction results.

These are our official social platforms: