Veil is live on Mainnet

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Veil

5 min readJan 15, 2019

Veil has launched on Ethereum’s Mainnet. Veil is a peer-to-peer prediction market and derivatives platform built on top of Augur, 0x, and Ethereum.

Login to Veil using your Ethereum wallet or signup for a new account to get started. Make sure you are using an Ethereum wallet like Metamask on desktop or Coinbase Wallet on mobile.

Veil is only launching in limited jurisdictions. The Veil platform is operated by Veil International, Ltd, a company in the Cayman Islands. The platform is not available to users in the United States, Cuba, Syria, North Korea, the Crimea region, any OFAC-embargoed nations, or any other jurisdiction where applicable law would prohibit the user from trading derivatives or cryptoassets using the Veil platform. Learn more by reading our Rulebook.

If you have any questions, concerns, or feedback, don’t hesitate to reach out to the Veil team via email, Twitter, or Discord. Also read our Frequently Asked Questions to learn more.

To celebrate our launch, we want to highlight some of the things you can do on Veil. Here’s the list:

Buy and sell 5x leveraged cryptocurrencies

Veil makes it easy to buy leveraged long or short positions in BTC/USD, REP/USD, and ZRX/USD. Under the hood, these products are structured as 7 day Augur scalar markets that are settled in ETH. And the bounds are based on the spot price when the market is created and the desired amount of leverage (in this case 5x). Trade these open markets now:

Speculate on Ethereum’s gas price and hash rate

Markets on Veil don’t have to use price as their underlying, and Ethereum gas price and hash rate markets are great examples of this. These markets let you trade on the network’s 24-hour rolling gas price and hash rate, which we expect will be valuable hedging products for relayers and miners. It’s easy to imagine similar products for Bitcoin and attributes of other blockchains as a next step. Here are open gas price and hash rate markets:

Trade GRIN on Ethereum

Grin, the popular Mimblewimble blockchain, just launched today! We’re very curious about the price of GRIN, the blockchain’s native token, so we’ve designed two markets to track it over the coming months. The first is an Augur scalar market that resolves to the price of GRIN in USD on March 15th, two months after launch. The bounds of the market are $0 and $20, and the resolution source is set to CoinMarketCap. Since there is some risk that CoinMarketCap does not list GRIN/USD by expiration, we’ve created a second binary market that tracks whether it is listed on CoinMarketCap or not. This kind of flexibility is one of the reasons we’re fans of Augur—take a position in the scalar market and hedge the listing risk via the second market.

Markets like these are also great price discovery tools because they track what the community thinks the price will be in the future without having to actually buy, sell, or mine GRIN now. Trade Grin markets on Veil now:

Predict which film will win the Academy Awards Best Picture

Many of the early markets on Veil are native to the crypto community, but we expect markets to start being created in all kinds of verticals. One example is the Academy Awards. We’ve created a market on Veil that lets you trade on which film will win this year’s Best Picture prize. Nominations will be announced on January 22, 2019, and the ceremony will take place on February 24, 2019. Like other prediction markets, Veil lets you buy for (i.e. long) or against (i.e. short) any film and sell those positions if public perception (and therefore price) changes. Predict the Best Picture now:

What film will win Best Picture at the 91st Academy Awards?

Show-off your predictive performance

One of our favorite features on Veil is the leaderboard. It tracks users’ performance across all markets and ranks you based on your returns. Challenge yourself to stay near the top of the leaderboard or go browse what successful users are doing on the platform. We think of your performance and predictive capability as another form of reputation and are excited to create more experiences on Veil that surface and use your track record.

Nominate an Augur market for listing

While at first Veil only supports a few very curated markets, our intention is to list as many Augur markets as possible. So we’re sure to prioritize listing the right markets, we’ve built a feature to let you nominate Augur markets for Veil. Just submit an Augur market’s ID (browse Veil or Predictions.Global to find Augur market IDs), and we’ll list the markets as soon as we can. Ultimately, we’ll have tools to help you create your own Augur markets, but this feature is a good first step in that direction.

Trade using Veil’s Pro UI

Want a more exchange-like UI for trading Augur positions? In addition to Veil’s normal UI, we’ve built Veil Pro for more sophisticated traders. The features are largely the same, but the layout will be more familiar to those used to other exchanges.

Set up a trading bot using Veil’s API

Especially for leveraged cryptocurrencies and other scalar markets, we expect a lot of liquidity to come from programmatic trading strategies. Get set up with Veil’s API now and launch a trading bot. We’ll do more work in the near future to onboard the community to our API, but in the meantime we recommend reading through the API docs here.

Get paid immediately with Instant Settlement

Veil offers a feature we call Instant Settlement that lets you get paid for your positions as soon as markets expire. As soon as support markets are reported on, we let you sell your Augur shares to Veil at the reported price rather than waiting for finalization in Augur. Instant settlement is optional, and it’s meant to augment and not replace Augur’s decentralized oracle system.

Conclusion

As we mentioned in last week’s announcement, our goal is to bring Augur and peer-to-peer markets mainstream. We foresee a not-so-distant future where millions of people create and trade in millions of markets. And we’re thrilled to finally launch Veil on Mainnet and bring that future just a little closer.

Veil was founded in the Fall of 2018 by Paul Fletcher-Hill, Feridun Mert Celebi, and Graham Kaemmer. The company is backed by Paradigm, Sequoia Capital, and 1confirmation. Send us an email at hello@veil.co if you’re interested in working with us.

More resources to learn about Veil: