Augur V2 launch

The Augur (REP) protocol was founded by Jack Peterson and Joey Krug in 2014 with an alpha version of the platform released in 2015. The betting protocol was initially written in the Serpent smart contract language but was found to have several vulnerabilities. This led to a rewrite of the platform in Solidity. A beta version was released in March 2016 and the mainnet version was released in July 2018.

The Augur ICO occurred between August to October 2015 and raised US$5.3 million by collecting 19,053 Bitcoin (BTC) and 1,176,816 Ethereum (ETH). The platform’s native REP tokens were sold at a price of approximately US$0.63 each with about 3,500 users participating.

The REP token currently has a market capitalization of ~US$246.2 million. It trades for ~US$22.48 and has risen ~17.7% in the last week.

Traders on Augur participate in peer-to-peer prediction markets built around real-world events. Augur’s intricate reward and dispute model is designed to create a system where market odds are designed to naturally align with real-world sentiments.

The Augur platform functions with a smart contract that matches opposing orders, where users who want to make bets on the outcome of specific betting markets are connected and interact with each other. Markets can either be binary (Yes/No or one/or the other markets), categorical (multiple different fixed outcomes), or scalar (variable with opportunities to short or long).

Markets on Augur follow a four-stage progression: creation, trading, reporting, and settlement. Any user can create a market based on any real-world event. Trading can begin immediately after a market is created, and users are free to trade on any market. After the event on which the market is based has occurred, the outcome of the event is determined by Augur’s oracle. Once the outcome is determined, traders can close out their positions and collect their payouts.

REP, the platform’s native token is needed by market creators and by reporters when they report on the outcome of markets. Reporters confirm an outcome of a market by staking their REP on one of the possible results of each betting market. If a reporter’s report of a market’s outcome does not match the consensus reached by the other reporters, Augur redistributes the REP staked on the non-consensus outcome by this reporter to the reporters that reported with the consensus matched outcome.

Through owning REP, and participating in the accurate reporting on the outcomes of betting market events, token holders are entitled to a portion of the fees on the platform. The more REP a reporter owns, and the more it reports outcomes correctly, the more fees they will earn for their work in keeping the platform secure.

Augur v2 introduces a new REP token called "REPv2". Current REP holders will need to manually migrate their REP to the new REPv2 token to participate in the Augur v2 reporting system. A recent blog post suggests a migration tool will be provided within the Augur UI, and a full tutorial on migrating will be published.

In a Master plan, part 2, the Augur team outlines the new improvements added in Augur V2 and further goals for the future. The Augur team suggests “that if Bitcoin gave us decentralized currency and Ethereum brought decentralized computation, Augur will enable a decentralized financial system.”

Bets in Augur V2 are dollar-denominated, enabled by the DAI stablecoin currency and traders will no longer need to acquire ETH to trade. V2 will give traders the ability to bet on whether or not a market will lead to an invalid outcome, and have faster disputing periods. It will allow traders to store funds with a username and password. The post also indicates that trading will be faster, market-making will be cheaper and payouts will occur quicker.

Looking ahead, the Augur team will be working towards building Mobile-First UIs, indicated that “easy to use, fast, performant mobile interfaces are a priority for Augur.” The team will also be working towards making better market-making tools including creating Python libraries that enable people to use APIs for algorithmic trading and capabilities for Iceberg orders that allow large bettors/traders to place an order without others seeing the size of the order.

Sometime after the V2 launch, there will be comments and chatting within the platform to bring the “Offline social experience online.” The comments will be on a per market basis so that traders can have discussions about what’s going on surrounding the market, and the chat will be site-wide.