Augur Launches Prediction Market Beta Testing

After seven months of core development, Augur, a decentralized prediction market platform that rewards its users for correctly predicting future events, has officially begun its beta test. Ethereum-Based Service. The Augur team partnered with Microsoft Azure, tech giant Microsoft’s Ethereum-based “blockchain as a service” product, to launch their application on a decentralized and smart contract-enabled platform. Because most of the settlements, including the payout and betting processes on Augur involve smart contracts, the Augur team decided to launch their application on the Ethereum....

Augur, a decentralized platform allowing individuals to create prediction markets on a vast array of topics, announced today that it was launching its alpha test."Traditionally, prediction markets have fallen short due to their need for volume in order to be valuable forecasting tools," explained Jeremy Gardner, the Director of Operations at Augur. "Having a global, unstoppable, blockchain-based prediction markets platform means anyone in the world with internet can connect to Augur."However, Augur is not, itself, a prediction market. Rather, it is open-source code for a prediction markets....

Decentralized blockchain prediction market Augur has officially entered beta. First announced in early 2015 and spurred by a successful crowdfunding through the sale of its software tokens, Augur aims to allow users to trade on the outcome of events, and for the market to then leverage that crowdsourced information. With the news, Augur is now open to initial users, boasting what it called improved front-end design while enabling the creation of new markets that go beyond binary 'yes or no' answers. Further, Augur said it will soon release a revision of its original working paper as it....

Ethereum and smart contracts have a lot of promise and Augur is one of those applications. Cryptocurrency, and the underlying technologies that come along with it, have the potential to disrupt entire markets, forcing them to either fade away or change dramatically in order to remain relevant. Prediction markets are one thing that decentralization could massively overhaul, eliminating points of failure as well as the possibility of cheating or corruption, while retaining the advantages prediction markets have in forecasting outcomes. The blockchain also secures customers’ funds, assuring....

We recently caught up with Tony Sakich of Augur - here's what he had to say... First of all, tells little bit about what Augur is all about. Augur is a decentralized prediction market platform, the end result will be to change the manner information consensus is collected and aggregated. The bitcoin space is growing fast, where do you see Augur fitting into the overall infrastructure? Our goal it so supplement existing prediction markets with one that is decentralized which will increase the quality of potential outcomes. Is there anybody at the company that are users may be interested to....