Agur – The Ethereum Based Blockchain Betting Platform Goes Live
Earlier dubbed to be tthe “Uber for knowledge” by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Augur, a blockchain-based predictions platform has finally gone live! Augur is one of the oldest platforms built on Ethereum. The open-sourced software Augur allows users to create and make bets on anything from President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, to when the first hurricane in 2019 will make landfall in the U.S.
By entering a market dominated by the likes of PaddyPower and DraftKings, the team building Augur hopes to gain a competitive edge by lowering fees and allowing any user to create their own bets. Blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin that distributes several copies of a ledger to multiple parties, has been touted as a way to speed up transactions and lower their cost. And because no single party controls the system—unlike in the case of PaddyPower—it depends on users to come to a consensus on the accuracy of a bet’s outcome.
Augur raised about $5.5 million in an initial coin offering in 2015, though its REP tokens now have a $377.3 million market capitalization in secondary market trading. It plans to settle bets in Ethereum, while it plans to user REP tokens as incentives for users to accurately report on bets, or dispute outcomes that have been incorrectly reported.