Augur Wallet

What is augur?

Augur is a decentralized oracle and peer-to-peer protocol for prediction markets. It is free, public, open-source software and a set of smart contracts written in Solidity that can be deployed to the Ethereum blockchain. The Augur developers have decided to use the “Wisdom of the crowd” on the platform to generate forecasts, where some participants are betting on the outcome of the event, and the majority are seeing the results in order to gain the viewpoint of the collective mind. Augur is a cryptocurrency that is called the blockchain oracle or the personal predictor of Vitalik Buterin. REP is the utility token of the project.
Augur uses a “wisdom of the crowd” principle - it has extensive and robust features, and always rewards its members. It is entirely regulated by users betting on any event and remain anonymous. This feature allows everyone to make predictions and gain income without sharing their personal details.

Wisdom of the crowd

It is proved that the thoughts, opinions, and forecasts of the collective mind are more accurate and reliable than marketing research. Predictions are made on the website for events in all fields of human life, ranging from politics to bets on football matches.

The concept of “wisdom of the crowd” is an interesting concept for researchers. At the beginning of the 20th century, the British scientist Francis Galton carried out an experiment at a rural fair. He gave visitors the opportunity to determine the weight of the animal, providing a reward for the right answer. Approximately 1,000 people participated in the competition and when the professor measured the mathematical average of the bets made, 99.9% of the bets matched the correct answer. The collective mind has shown tremendous accuracy.

Augur history and team

Augur was released on 17/11/2014 and was one of the first projects on the Ethereum platform. The team consists of 13 specialists, led by Jack Peterson and Joey Krug. Augur advisors include Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.

How does it work

Augur runs on the Ethereum network, ensuring that there are no centralized servers capable of disabling the platform. To use Augur, everyone just needs to go to the website and choose the type of interesting forecast or create a new topic and place a bet. It is not a prediction market, but a software that lets people create their own forecasts on any topic.
This system is working like this: a person opens a survey, issues a certain number of shares, which will be redeemed by other market participants and also specifies the size of the fee, which can range from 0% to 50% of the total award to the survey winners - the lower fee, the more users engage in the survey. In order to trade, a user must choose an interesting subject and buy a certain number of voting shares. The price always varies between 0 and 1 ETH but it is not fixed and can be changed during the campaign process. Anyone can bet on both positive and negative results. The participant of the survey is not required to keep their shares until the end of the survey and can sell them. The buyer can make a resale or hold shares until the end and get a payout if it succeeds.

Augur v2

Augur announced the Augur v2 - update with a lot of fixed bugs from v1. The DAI stablecoin support is added to the improved version since Augur only worked with ETH. The DAI currency is tied to the fiat currency, which minimizes the possibility of price volatility. There are no total restrictions on the platform. The trading software has been redesigned and is now much faster and both desktop and mobile-friendly. Augur trading fees are very small with no withdrawal fees. Augur v2 introduces a social site-wide chat and feedback on every market.

Augur use cases

Augur is the perfect platform for sports betting, thanks to a decentralized structure, fast network, and low transaction fees. Augur fees are set by the users and usually significantly lower than conventional betting platforms allowing for more profit. Sport is the main usage, but there are several other ways, for example, betting on the results of any local, state, or national election in any region or to get an idea of ​​events in everyday life. Users are interested not only in major political and sports events, but also in other popular topics, such as cryptocurrency-related financial events, health-care field, and many more.

REP Token

REP is an internal system token that is not needed to place bets and used by oracles (arbiters) during market conflicts to validate the outcome of the voting results. In order to receive part of the commission fee, REP holders must put their tokens on the correct outcome of a particular event. A false topic is determined by the general consensus of the oracles. REP is not mined on any pool. All 11,000,000 tokens were issued at the start of the network.
Augur v2 also contains a token update - from ERC20 to ERC777. It will be launched on the Ethereum mainnet on 28/07/2020. In the future REP holders will need to migrate their REP to REPv2 after Augur v2's deployment. No immediate action needs to be taken, later a migration tool will be provided within the Augur UI, and a full tutorial will be published.