Guesser expands product and announces seed round to make prediction markets more accessible to mainstream users

At Guesser, our vision is a future where anyone can invest in the outcome of any world event, from finance to elections, weather, sports, stock prices, and anything else. By placing simple bets through Guesser, you trade forecasts of different outcomes on Augur’s decentralized prediction markets.

While Augur can be too complicated and time consuming for the average user, we’re building a user friendly interface that abstracts away the complexity of cryptocurrencies and makes investing in prediction markets as engaging and frictionless as investing in coins or stocks. And to that end, we’re excited to announce a new product release, as well as a $1.1M seed round to fuel our growth.

New product release

Until now, the Guesser interface included only a few markets curated by fairness and liquidity in a simple homepage and our special Bet of the Week, creating weekly markets that have seen tens of thousands of dollars wagered in their outcomes.

Starting today, Guesser is expanding to four dedicated sections for weekly events on Crypto (BTC, Maker, DeFi…), Finance (IPOs, asset prices…), Politics and General News, all four enjoying extra liquidity from the company.

This new release will strengthen Guesser’s position as the leading product for anyone to interact with open prediction markets in a seamless way. Users will also be able to enjoy a much richer market page with news related to the event, comments and other features.

$1.1M seed investment round

We are thrilled to announce we’ve partnered up with Version One, Compound and Boost VC through a $1.1M investment round that gives us the opportunity to build a top team of highly driven people, define market distribution, as well as act as a high liquidity provider in some markets.

We’re incredibly lucky to be surrounded by people who have built great companies and have helped others build great companies, which is something this space still lacks specially at a large scale. Boost’s investment also represents the first ever venture capital deal done using DAI. Thank you Boris, Angela, Josh, Brayton and Adam — the best of the best!

Our vision

As 2018 ended, we looked at Augur in depth and explained our vision of what was missing in decentralized prediction markets. Weeks later, we launched our alpha to a small group of users. Around two months ago, we opened that mainnet release to the world and launched our Bet of the Week initiative.

Where do we think the value in decentralized prediction markets lies, and how will we work on growing that? Our core thesis is as follows:

• Prediction markets are powerful because they open access to the financial value of information edges to anyone willing to place a forecast.
• Decentralized cryptocurrencies and smart contracts are the definitive solution to the hurdles that prediction markets have faced over decades to gain global relevance because they allow for the permissionless creation and trading of outcomes.
• This peer to peer core layer provides the necessary technology for this mission. Companies built harnessing this tech must provide the necessary distribution.
• Distribution combines creating easy to use products, onboarding large volumes, building engaging experiences around usage, and navigating different legal landscapes… that’s what we are working on.

Join our team

Making predictions more accessible and easy to grasp means:

• Scaling the site to a stage where hundreds of markets are organized in tens of topics.
• Creating a mobile-native experience.
• Accepting multi-currency payments.
• Allowing heavy users to create markets as well as open orders.
• Making interacting with this tech as simple as possible.
• And much more!

We need your help to make this happen. We are currently hiring in Madrid, Spain, where our headquarters are. The European environment is friendlier to crypto companies, and we believe this combination of an EU team with U.S. partners will be one that grows popular in the blockchain space. Also, you get to enjoy Madrid’s awesome lifestyle!

We are looking for awesome people who’d like to join as:

• Frontend Developer: help us build and improve one of the best UI/UXs in the space. Think people, feelings and behaviors; create code, designs and product flows.
• Backend Developer: help us scale the site and its usage while you enjoy tinkering with the connections to the smart contracts layer.
• Data Engineer: have full flexibility and decision making power in building, developing and deploying our market data infrastructure.

We love the feel of a small, focused, mission-driven team, and we’re willing to welcome you on board as we build the future of this alternative financial system. Get in touch!