Augur – the permissionless prediction market – has officially announced its V2 deployment in June.
The highly anticipated upgrade comes jam-packed with a ton of exciting improvements including but not limited to support for Dai, Uniswap V2 and a new and improved UI/UX. The creation of new V1 markets will cease on May 15th, with REP being migrated to a new token standard (ERC777) to make for enhanced use-cases.
Augur v2 Deployment Detailshttps://t.co/XekHvjG4ro
— Augur (@AugurProject) April 2, 2020
What’s New?
Augur V2 marks the launch of an entirely new experience, most important the introduction of Dai-based trading should help mitigate volatility and opportunity cost as a result of having to purchase and exit trades in ETH.
As for the markets themselves, V2 introduces “INVALID” outcomes. This is important as a lot of markets created on Augur V1 were too vaguely worded for REP stakers to determine the outcome. With this new introduction, it’s now possible for markets to be resolved as invalid, rather than one of the two proposed outcomes. This allows for more REP to be staked to any given market as stakeholders no longer need to worry that their market may be resolved as invalid – resulting in slashed REP despite the correct outcome of what the market was created to monitor.
Other novel aspects of Augur V2 include:
- Resolution Windows – The resolution time of a market will be reduced from a minimum of 7 days to a minimum of 1 day
- Referral Links – Users will have the ability to earn referrals when driving volume to a market
- Metatransactions – Market creators will have the ability to pay transaction costs on behalf of their users.
- Cost Efficiency – With tools like metatransactions and Uniswap v2, the cost of transacting with Augur will be much cheaper.
Outside of these features, Augur will also be integrating a suite of notable DeFi projects including 0x Mesh, Maker, Wyre and more wallets like Fortmatic and Torus.
Augur v2 uses @UniswapExchange, @0xProject, @MakerDAO, @GnosisSAFE, @Portis_io, @TorusLabs, @Fortmatic, @SendWyre and more!
— Augur (@AugurProject) March 30, 2020
Why Should I Care?
For those who have ever tried to use Augur, it’s no surprise that the current experience is tedious, to say the least. While we’ve seen solutions like Guesser pop up to make it easier for users to participate in curation markets – the potential for a permissionless, censorship resistance curation market is only just beginning.
In the midst of a global pandemic, we can assume that prediction markets on everything from political elections to COVID-19 economic impacts are just the tip of the iceberg.
When the next coronavirus strikes, it may face a fresh and formidable foe: open prediction markets.
Just published a quick look at how decentralized market forces can help signal & hedge pandemic risk.https://t.co/pY9mFZfDZn
— Ben Davidow (@Ben_davidow) March 31, 2020
Get Involved
For those looking to stay up to date on all things Augur V2, sign up to receive launch updates here.
For our more technically inclined readers, Augur is currently hosting a bug bounty to identify any open loops in the code.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on the lauch and recommend following the Augur Twitter in the meantime!
Cooper is focused on building compelling blockchain products. He currently works as the managing director at Fitzner Blockchain Consulting and is a contributor to DAOs like MetaCartel and Moloch. He is an active member of the Ethereum community and has a strong interest in for-profit businesses such as The Block Crypto and Messari.
