What is Augur?

Augur is an open-source, decentralized, peer-to-peer forecasting platform for cryptocurrency users to create their own prediction markets. It was founded in 2014 by Jack Peterson and Joey Krug.

Built on the Ethereum blockchain, Augur’s aim is to create a highly accurate prediction and betting market, based on the “Wisdom of the Crowd“ concept — an idea that the collective views of a group of individuals is more accurate when it comes to predicting, rather than the opinions of a select number of experts.

Augur is public and freely available for anyone to create an event to predict, which can include upcoming events, elections, races and even forecasting the success of companies’ products and goals. With all of the information stored on the blockchain, participating parties can see the actual results.

Augur runs on its own unique cryptographic token, called Reputation (REP). Event makers will create a market for their event on the Augur platform and will be rewarded for reporting on the outcome of event. Participants can trade on the outcome of any event, for instance, a football game, buying and selling shares in its market. When the event is over and resolved, participants who hold shares in the winning outcomes are paid out from the market contract, and the ones who lost lose their bets. And the event reporters who gave the right information receive a portion of the market settlement fees. Reporters who lied or failed to report correctly do not get paid, and end up losing REP. Traders are not required to participate in the reporting process.

Augur participants do not necessarily need REP to place predictions, or bets. Most traders opt to use ETH instead as it is more popular and accessible. However, REP is necessary for reporters to report on events. REP is essentially for governance reasons, to settle events.

Besides REP being used for creating predictions, or bets, purchasing participation tokens and disputing a bets outcome, you can receive REP from reporting on a bet, purchasing it on an exchange, or being right about a dispute.

Interesting facts

Joey Krug, the co-founder of Augur, briefly attended Pomona College and studied computer science before dropping out in 2014 to fully focus his time on Augur.
Augur is the world’s first decentralized prediction-market platform. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, said, “I have been excited about the possibility of prediction markets on Ethereum for a long time, and I’m pleased to see Augur being a leader in releasing such a sophisticated system into the wild.”
The total supply of Augur is 11 million, and there is no mining program.
Website: https://www.augur.net/

Whitepaper: https://www.augur.net/whitepaper.pdf

Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/augur/

Originally published at cryptofinance24.com.