Augur (REP)

Augur

Type	Token, Prediction Market
Ticker symbol	REP

Basics

• An Ethereum-based open source decentralized prediction market that leverages the wisdom of the crowds to create a search engine for the future that runs on its own token, REP. Augur allows users to create their markets for specific questions they may have and to profit from the trading buys while allowing users to buy positive or negative shares regarding the outcome of a future event.
• "Augur, one of the first protocols built on the Ethereum blockchain, lets people trade on any assets or events in the world with unlimited stakes and for low fees. Since Augur is peer-to-peer, nobody has custody over users funds. Augur currently denominates trades in Ether, Ethereum's native cryptocurrency. In upcoming Augur v2, the first major upgrade, traders will use a stablecoin (DAI) pegged to the U.S. Dollar."

History

• Early development of the software began in autumn 2014, mainnet was launched in summer 2018. As of 2024, its website https://www.augur.net/ does not work anymore, and development has not happened in years.

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found here. Max payout is $30,000 (29-6-2020).
• Blockchain Security DB (29-6-2020) shows 1audit. The latest was in 3-2018.
• Scored a 74% on DeFi Safety (25-1-2021); "It should be higher but they have not taken the time to update their docs.  We waited a month but they still couldn't finish it."

Governance

DAO

• From their blog (3-12-2021):

"An Augur DAO will be established using a DXdao Guild. A Guild is an ERC-20 governance structure which is a stepping stone to their full Governance 2.0 vision. This Guild provides methods for on-chain proposal creation, voting, and execution similar to Compound governance (without delegation). This version of the DXdao Guild contracts has been customized to work with Augur’s REPv2 and has been designed to allow for upgradability that will let the DAO vote on how to follow REPv2 forks during the Augur oracle resolution process.

The smart contracts and UI to support DAO voting are currently in active development, with the smart contracts scheduled for audit by the end of November, 2021. The expected timelines for next steps are as follows:

November 17, 2021 - Announce intentions and structure for AugurDAO. Begin taking feedback on the AugurDAO forum at daotalk.org on a variety of topics.

November 22, 2021 - Begin smart contract audits for ERC20 Guild-based governance for AugurDAO.

December 15, 2021 - Submit signal proposal to DXdao governance detailing DXdao’s support of and partnership with AugurDAO.

December - January 2022 - Initial funding of AugurDAO treasury plus release of governance"

Token

ICO

• From August to October 2015, a global crowdfunding campaign raised US $5.2 million. Augur conducted one of the first ICOs in 2015. Augur is among the top 10 most profitable ICOs on Ethereum.

Token allocation

• A total of 8.8 million (80%) of all 11 million tokens were sold to investors as part of the crowd sale. The remaining 2.2 million tokens were distributed to the team/advisors (16%) and to the Forecast Foundation (4%), a non-profit organization that is formally responsible for managing the maintenance, enhancement, and promotion of the platform.

Utility

• Fees from prediction markets are distributed to REP tokenholders for participation. 
• From Bankless (12-2-2020):

"REP tokenholders earn fees in ETH (soon Dai) when they report honestly on the outcomes of any of the prediction markets."

Token Details

• From this post by Token Tuesdays (29-1-2020):

"Augur is one of the original token economies to provide exogenous rewards for its token holders. With Augur v1, REP token holders have the ability to arbitrate prediction markets and earn ETH fees for honest reporting on outcomes. However, with the upcoming upgrade to Augur v2, the plan is to integrate DAI as the primary asset for betting on prediction markets."

Tech

• Whitepaper can be found here.

Implementations

• Built on: Ethereum and Polygon (25-5-2021).

How it worked

• Supports 3 types of events: Binary (outcomes are YES and NO), Categorical (there are multiple discrete outcomes, for example, winning candidate in an election), and Scalar (there is a Lower and Upper boundary defined for such an event).
• “In Augur, the ownership of outcome shares is currently recorded in the data structures of the smart contracts, and transfers are tightly controlled by the trading functions. This allows Augur to collect fees whenever the shares are traded (i.e. amount of fees is proportional to the trading volume). Fees are currently collected in ETH, and are specified as a parameter when a market is created (default suggested values are 1% for makers and 2% for takes). These fees are split 50/50 between the creator of the market and the REP holders who happen to participate in the resolution”
• “Other than providing a source of income for market creators, and entertainment for speculators, Augur provides another useful feature by leveraging the wisdom of the crowd concept ( if you ask the same question to a large number of people, their average answer will always be far more accurate then the answer provided by a specialist), meaning that Augur can be used as the search engine for the future.”
• Using the 0x protocol

Upgrades

• Augur v2 launches July 28 2020.
• Started syncing data from The Graph for faster user experience (18-12-2020).

Oracle Method

• From this list curated by Linda Xie on Github (8-4-2020):

"Oracle Method

After a market enters reporting, an Initial Reporter (typically the market creator), selects which outcome occurred. This becomes the “Tentative Winning Outcome.”

Users can dispute the Tentative Winning Outcome by staking REP on an alternative outcome that they believe to be correct. An alternative outcome requires a specified threshold of REP, which is called the Dispute Bond, to be staked on it in order to become the new Tentative Winning Outcome.

In v2, if you stake REP in favor of an outcome that the market ends up resolving to, you receive a 40% ROI on your staked REP (except in the case of an usued pre-stake or initial reporting). If you stake on an outcome that the market does not end up resolving to, you lose your entire stake.

With each successive dispute round, a higher Dispute Bond is needed to shift the Tentative Winning Outcome. A user may contribute the full Dispute Bond or fill it partially as part of a crowd-sourced fill along with other users.

Source https://www.augur.net/blog/v2-resolution"

• Chainlink for its sports betting Augur Turbo on Polygon (25-5-2021).

Their Other Projects

Augur Turbo

• From Paradigm (25-5-2021):

"The six-year-old prediction platform is chasing the surging sports betting market by building with Chainlink and Polygon. Augur Turbo will rely on Chainlink’s oracle network, or a way to feed external data into programmable smart contracts. With the Chainlink integration, users can create betting markets for the National BasketBall Association, Major League Baseball, Mixed Martial Arts and the Olympics. Support for the National Football League, college football, soccer, tennis, golf and esports will soon follow. Chainlink will deliver data such as schedules, post-game scores, team and player stats. Augur Turbo’s prediction markets will rely on Chainlink data to settle bets immediately after a market closes. The move to Polygon highlights Augur’s desire to capture more users." Burned their Admin Key

• From CCN (24-7-2018)

"Augur had implemented a kill switch mechanism in their smart contract which allowed their developers to fix issues in the event of any unanticipated problems. This was employed to prevent any critical or fatal bug(s) from attacking the network. However, as evident from this transaction, the ownership of the kill switch privileges has been transferred to a burn address. This essentially means that the Augur team no longer has any privileged access over the network."

OracleDAO

• From Crypto Briefing (5-3-2020):

"OracleDAO’s manifesto explained that its aim was to coordinate efforts to build tools and market Augur and its native token, REP. The people behind the initiative said that they expect Augur-related marketing, research, and engineering funding proposals on the platform.

By forking Moloch, the organization hopes to gain more freedom from the Forecast Foundation, a non-profit tasked with overseeing Augur development. While the manifesto noted that its development was “active and strong,” improvements to other tools could also be made. 

OracleDAO members will also be expected to pay contributions to the organization in the DAI stablecoin, mirroring Moloch. Also following the tradition of MolochDAO will be the member onboarding process—in order to join, users must get approval from other DAO members. Users will also be able to withdraw their shares at any time and could be sacked from the organization by vote from other members."

Roadmap

• From EthHub Weekly #83 (15-10-2019):

"Augur will be getting a major upgrade in Q1 of 2020 with the release of 0x trading, the integration of Dai, faster trading and a new native Augur betting UI."

• From DeFi Rate (9-10-2019):

"Three versions of Augur are due for release in quick succession at the beginning of next year.

1. The first is v1.5, which integrates 0x and allows partially off-chain trading. This off-chain extension aims to improve the speeds at which people can create and change orders, rather than wait for these changes to register on-chain.
2. The second release, v2, involves the integration of MakerDAO’s Dai token.
3. Finally, the v3 release is intended to be a “fast-trading” version of the platform, which will improve the overall trading experience and especially liquidity.

Augur also plans to provide its users with an easy-to-access mobile user interface, as well as build and deliver tools for market-making."

• From their blog (2-4-2020):

"Augur’s v2 contracts will be deployed to the Ethereum network and go live during the first weeks of June, pending finalization for v1 markets ending before the cut-off date, with the REP migration beginning on a similar timeline."

Usage

• Although Augur did launch it failed to get immediate huge success (low usage), it does create interesting use cases. One example can be found here.
• The top 10 markets total hit $5.35mil in early December on Augur.
• From Formal Verification (31-7-2020):

"Although only a few days since launching, Augur V2 has encountered a wide set of issues that have made initial usage near impossible. With current Ethereum congestions, users have reported paying ~$30 to create an account [Update31-7-2020: no more fees are required for account creation] and upwards of $40 to withdraw their funds (e.g. DAI) from Augur contracts due to the gas required to execute the contract logic.

Additionally, there have been Augur-specific bug issues, particularly on the front-end, which has hindered any meaningful adoption so far. For example, account activations have often failed requiring users to deposit amounts within a certain bound (40-100 DAI). On top of this, users have reported seeing overestimated gas costs requiring users to rely on other 3rd parties like Metamask. This has lead developers to quickly work on several long-term solutions just when the community thought the V2 roadblocks had ended.

Looking at the numbers, there are only 4 markets with any volume or open interest, most of which centre around the 2020 U.S. Presidential election - the largest market having just under $12k in volume."

Projects that use or built on it

• Catnip (8-10-2020).

Cons

Cons

• Critique from Nic Carter

"Users have been complaining about being misled by tricky contracts, markets resolving incorrectly, or poorly-worded contracts. Aside from amateurishly-drafted contracts (this is what we pay lawyers for, folks) borking in interesting ways, Augur faces the more general problem of might makes right on the platform. It’s possible by repeatedly appealing markets to get a favorable, albeit incorrect, outcome."

Competition

• Gnosis and Helena (which are partners.
• More info here (5-5-2020).

Team, investors, Partners

Team

• Krug, Joey; co-founder
• Peterson, Jack; co-founder
• Micah Zoltu; an independent software developer who is also one of the co-authors of the original white paper
• Bernstein, Ron; advisor
• Jeremy Gardner
• Jack Hess; calls himself a co-creator

Investors

• Is part of the portfolio (9-3-2020) of 1confirmation.

Partners

• Has worked with Startup Studio (7-2019)
• As of 7-2019 on the partner & clients list of ZeppelinOS. They have done a security audit of Augur Core.
• Has worked (12-2-2020) with Authereum for audits (together with ZeppelinOS)

The Forecast Foundation

• The Forecast Foundation is primarily focused on developing the Augur smart contracts and core UI to connect to Augur.

OracleDAO

Basics

• A MolochDAO style booster of Augur/REP.
• From their manifesto (9-3-2020):

"OracleDAO is a smart contract aimed and coordinating efforts to build tools and market Augur, and its token REP. It is expected this DAO will propose funding of marketing, research, and engineering related to the Augur project. This DAO will follow the traditions of MolochDAO, focusing on positive externality projects to improve value for REP holders and users of Augur. DAO members will be expected to pay tribute in DAI, and vote on proposals to fund projects. Also following the tradition of MolochDAO, members must get approval from other members to join, may withdraw at any time, and may be removed from the DAO by vote from other members.

Why another DAO? Why not let the Forecast Foundation do this?

During this rise, it has become clear development is seeing a tragedy of commons. The Forecast Foundation is primarily focused on developing the Augur smart contracts and core UI to connect to Augur. While this development is active and strong, other quality of life tools that also connect to Augur or could improve the quality of Augur have not appeared. This is primarily due to the Forecast Foundation’s size and limited engineering and marketing resources. Other’s have begun to build tools and market Augur, but those attempts are highly centralized and at any point could be removed, significantly reducing the quality of life of Augur’s users and REP holders. Not only this, these quality of life improvements could be worked on in parallel of the development of Augur itself.

Enter OracleDAO

OracleDAO could immediately change this. OracleDAO could help scale engineering by hiring external consultants to improve the product, or fund development of open-source tools that connect to and use Augur. Not only this, but an external aid to the Forecast Foundation to aid in non-engineering tasks could allow for a separation of concerns which allows the Foundation to focus solely on the main UI and smart contract development. Members of OracleDAO can have direct say in what projects are funded to improve Augur, and are not beholden to the Forecast Foundation’s product roadmap, which may push out projects that are high value, but not a main focus of the Foundation."

Governance

• From their manifesto (9-3-2020):

"MolochDAO’s tradition is that members pay tribute to the DAO, in order to receive voting shares. At any time, members can burn their shares and receive an equivalent percentage of the tribute pool. Members must also vote new members in by giving them shares. At its core, this gives a simple mechanic for funding projects.

1. Members recognize a project will improve their overall aggregated value. Members put a price on how much this could improve their value.
2. Members vote a new external consultant to become a member of the DAO and implement the project. New shares are created and given to the new member, whose total value is equivalent to the project cost. Since the project cost is usually less than the overall value gained by the members, it is profitable for them to do so.
3. Upon completion of the project, Members distribute shares to the consultant. The consultant then burns their shares, withdrawing payment.

For REP holders case, a more concrete example may be that REP holders believe a new language may improve the value. OracleDAO members vote a consultant to work on a new language in the Augur UI, and pay them shares equivalent to ◈10000 upon completion. If the aggregated pool of shares is now dilluted, but overall, members of the DAO who may be REP holders or Market Makers capture this value in REP price or market volume, the project is profitable.

There are more details about governance, but members should see MolochDAO’s whitepaper, and prepare for a fork to be summoned in the near future. At the start, members should be expected to tribute at least ◈500 [[[DAI]]] to join."

(:

Knowledge empowers all and will help us get closer to the decentralized world we all want to live in!

Making these free wiki pages is fun but takes a lot of effort and time.

If you have enjoyed reading, tips are appreciated :) This will help us to keep expanding this archive of information.

ETH tip address: 0x83460bE5F218b1520B69D702cE60A1DE37dD8E31