Augur, a prediction market proves its worth by allowing users place bets during US elections.
Augur is a project handled by the Ethereum blockchain and facilitated by its native token, REP. Augur can be defined as a decentralised oracle and prediction market protocol, owned and operated by the people who make use of it and the REP investors.
The augur network allow it’s users to make predictions that in turn, acquire a monetary value, the way a bet does. That is to say, it’s users can forecast on the outcomes of political movements, cryptocurrency movements and also naatural disasters. Augur is an open market place where users can bet on.
What is Augur?
Explanations by the Augur website stated that Augur is a decentralized oracle and peer to peer protocol for prediction markets.
It is an unrefined, public, open source software, with portions of it licensed under the General Public License (GPL) and some other portions licensed under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) license.
Augur was also described by the site as set of smart contracts written in Solidity that can be deployed to the Ethereum blockchain.
The site also made mention of Augur being a protocol that is freely available for people to use whichever way they please. One can access Augur through a desktop client app, suchlike interacting with an Ethereum or Bitcoin node.
The users of the Augur protocol are advised to ensure that the actions they are performing comply with the laws in all applicable jurisdictions and should also acknowledge that other users of the Augur protocol may not comply by this rule, therefore users of the Augur protocol use the service at their own risks.
How Augur works
It is very simple to use Augur. Firstly, the users must select and event that they want to hem in on. Let’s take the US midterm elections as an instance.
Within the event, augur users can bet on a specific market, or even generate their own, so, for example, a market may state something like ‘democrats or republicans to win the house in US midterms’.
After this, other investors can make their trade on the outcome of the market by backing whichever outcome they want to bet for, so again in this instance, an investor may bet with a batch of Ethereum or REP tokens on the republicans taking the house after the US midterms.
Due to augur’s decentralization, the final outcome is reported before the winning bets are returned, so that all users have the chance to query the outcome if they think it is unfair or inaccurate. Lastly, those who (through their bets) own shares of the winning market will receive their payout, and end of contract.
