Veil has launched their new prediction market platform on Ethereum’s Mainnet. It is a peer-to-peer prediction market and derivatives platform built on top of Augur, 0x, and Ethereum.
The major launch looks to have revitalised the market for the Augur token REP over the last week, with the token gaining price from around $8 to now currently over $14.
Coin Rivet recently reported that the Augur platform had been losing momentum over the last few months. The increased project valuation of over 60% in seven days has boosted the Augur project’s market cap from $100 million to over $160 million.
How it works
The overall goal of the platform is “to make Augur and peer-to-peer markets mainstream.” The project foresees a not-so-distant future where millions of people create and trade in millions of markets. With the launch of the Veil platform, they are hoping to bring that future just a little bit closer.
You can log in to the Veil app using Ethereum wallets, such as Metamask or the Coinbase app on your mobile.
Veil is also only launching in limited jurisdictions. In their launch blog post, they mentioned that the platform is “not available to users in the United States, Cuba, Syria, North Korea, the Crimea region, or any OFAC-embargoed nations.”
What you can do on the platform
On the Veil platform, you can buy and sell 5x leveraged cryptocurrencies. Initial markets at launch include BTC/USD, REP/USD, and ZRX/USD.
These leveraged products are structured as 7-day Augur Scalar markets that are settled in ETH. So, for example, the Bitcoin settled market is based on the Augur-backed prediction market to ascertain “What will be the price of Bitcoin (BTC) in USD at 4pm PST on Friday, January 18, 2019?”
Other popular launch markets include “What film will win Best Picture at the 91st Academy Awards?”
Users also have the ability to use a new range of functionality like nominating an Augur market for listing, trading using Veil’s Pro UI, or even setting up trading bots.
After winning a bet, it’s also possible to get paid immediately with Instant Settlement. This feature lets you get paid for your positions as soon as markets expire.
Stablecoins next?
This launch from Veil certainly shows a lot of promise. To combine a number of cryptocurrency protocols on the Ethereum network to deliver a ‘decentralised’ market creation platform is impressive. The one big issue at the moment relates to the fact you still need to lock up Ether on the platform – this creates issues in tracking ‘realised profits’ back into USD (due to ETH volatility).
There has been a lot of talk about integrating stablecoins (like DAI) into the Augur protocol. The sooner they can integrate more stable forms of value into the platform, the easier I think they will find it to explain their unique value proposition of unstoppable markets on a public blockchain like Ethereum.