Augur: Unstoppable Markets for Everything
On Tuesday morning, July 24, 2018, a quiet revolution happened. Augur, the betting platform on Ethereum, transferred a special capability to a public address with no known private keys.
A world transforming engine was turned on two weeks ago, and after running smoothly with no serious bugs, the decision was made to make it truly censorship resistant: the kill switch was locked away. Nobody can shut down Augur now without shutting down the entire Ethereum network, a feat that would take coordinated government effort and billions of dollars.
Background
You may have heard of Augur, the decentralized application that allows anyone to make a market and bet on anything. There are markets about political candidates and markets about sports. There are even markets about markets one can bet on. But to describe Augur simply as a gambling platform would be like calling McDonald’s a hamburger seller.
Augur’s raison d’etre is to be a decentralized oracle. It is, in fact, a magical internet truth teller, powered by game theory and cryptoeconomics.
The idea behind Augur is found in the efficient markets hypothesis: that markets offer information through the actions of thousands (millions) of people making small and large bets on outcomes. This information helps everyone who pays attention to it, such as businesses, entrepreneurs, and governments. It gives answers to past events (who won the 2018 World Cup?) that were bet on, and gives probabalistic answers to future events (who will win the 2018 World Series?).
The Future is Probabalistic
It is impossible to predict the future with 100% accuracy, but using probability can allow speculators and producers to create new markets, benefitting both. Consider: commodities markets allowed farmers to better hedge against erratic prices. Augur has a number of meta markets that allow hedges in new areas that didn’t exist before: one can now hedge one’s ETH holdings, or even one’s pension.
Already, there is over $1 million at stake on Augur, as speculators have begun using it for fun and profit. Outcomes are reported on by holders of REP, which is staked by users to honestly report outcomes.
Augur acts as a sort of umbrella market that encompasses all known markets-from sports betting, to stock markets, commodities markets, and more. Anything can be bet on using Augur, as anyone can create their own prediction for people to bet on.
What does one do with this knowledge?
Use it for fun and profit! Use it for information and forecasting. Ideally, Augur will continue to grow in usage and liquidity, creating accurate markets for future events. And as Augur grows, better, more accurate historical information is saved to the blockchain.
Third party websites are already being built around Augur, displaying markets and other data in a greater variety of ways than the application. Because Augur is a decentralized application (dapp), it can be accessed in a wide variety of ways, and anyone can create their own user interface upon which it can be viewed (or used).
The Future is Bright
Augur is an unstoppable, decentralized application that might be the next great use case for Ethereum (the first being as an ICO platform). It is highly resistant to censorship, meaning governments will need to go to extraordinary lengths to stop its use, and it could offer meaningful data and hedging opportunities for speculators and producers alike. Whether this ultimately becomes a tool that improves civilization is yet to be seen.
Of course, a few quick clicks can set up a prediction market and ask exactly that question.
The future is pretty cool.
What Hedge Offers
Security:
Hedge leads the industry in providing secure wallets with proprietary best in class distributed cold storage practices. The keys to your funds never touch the internet and cannot be stolen by hackers. There is no single point of failure that can jeopardize your fiduciary.
Applications:
Hedge offers application interface solutions to make your apps work with our apps. Small regional bank looking to compete? Incorporate Hedge’s APIs into your app and give your customers the ability to buy and sell bitcoin through your institution.
Access:
Hedge is the only firm in the industry that gives you 24/7 access to your funds. We net settle transactions in a proprietary process that maintains the safety of keys in cold storage, but with near real time trading.
Let Hedge manage blockchains; you manage your clients.
