Augur Reboot

TL;DR

• Dark Florists have received funding from the Lituus Foundation to allocate towards the vision of building censorship resistant prediction software.
• Killari, Alex, and Micah are the developers who will begin work on getting AugurCP deployed on Ethereum Mainnet using the Augur v2 DAI contracts.
  • NOTE: This will not cause Augur to be cheap to use! The purpose is to pick a relatively small project to get the ball rolling and see if there is any real interest in Augur.
• The future beyond AugurCP is very uncertain, but we would like to work with Lituus Foundation on figuring out the future of Augur, whether that is on its own blockchain, an L2, or some other network.

Augur CP

A long time ago Micah put together a demo/prototype for an Augur Constant Product (AugurCP) application that used Augur under the hood but provided a more streamlined trading experience similar to Uniswap. It also included a solution to the invalid market problem where if a market finalizes as invalid, everyone would get back whatever they put into the system. It does come with the caveat that you cannot withdraw profits until the market finalizes, but you can withdraw winnings up to the amount you put in prior to market finalization. While we understand that it is possible/likely that simplicity wasn't the primary reason Augur v2 didn't really hit off, we feel that getting this project integrated and available is a good way to get into Augur development and get the platform back up and running quickly.

Technically, Augur v2 is still "operational" but due to the nature of how the UI was designed, it is very difficult to use at the moment. With AugurCP we hope to build a simple fully censorship resistant and privacy preserving version of the UI that will work indefinitely even if we cease development immediately after launch. We plan to design/build the UI for it such that it has no external dependencies and can be run off any file server (like IPFS), only needing a browser wallet to connect to Ethereum with. Even if we stop here, our hope is that people will be able to use Augur in the future without needing to worry about the UI breaking on them at some point.

Initial Team

The initial core team for this project will be Killari, Alex, and Micah who are all well known and active members of the Augur Discord server. The tentative roles for each will be:

• Killari - Full Time Technical Lead
• Alex - Part Time Developer
• Micah - Technical Advisor and Ethos Guide

Our hope is to drag out our funding runway as long as possible, so we likely will keep the team relatively small. We may (or may not) hire 1-2 additional people if needed, such as for UI work.

Future

One of the top complaints people have with Augur is the Ethereum transaction fees for using it. The fees essentially limit it to very big/wealthy participants and make it largely inaccessible to casual/small participants. There are many proposed solutions to this problem, but unfortunately these solutions each come with pretty huge downsides. The most common solution proposed is to just move to "cheap blockchain X" or "cheap L2 Y". There are two problems with these solutions:

1. While Ethereum isn't perfect on censorship resistance, it is significantly better than most other options out there. One day we will see someone build something that is more censorship resistant than Ethereum and we will consider that with great interest, but until then most/all options require trading off some censorship resistance.
2. Often times systems with "low fees" are such just because they have little activity on them. Should they reach the same scale as Ethereum, they would similarly have high fees just like Ethereum.

Prediction tools have historically been heavily censored by regulators and institutions, so Augur has a strong need for censorship resistance. We want to build something that cannot be turned off, even if you wrench attack all of the builders of it, very similar to Tornado Cash (where the developers have effectively been wrench attacked yet the system continues to operate as designed). For this reason, we cannot ignore (1). Since we want something that has low fees not just today, but also in the future, systems that fail on (2) don't really solve this problem.

That being said, we do want to try to solve this problem and after AugurCP is launched we will begin exploring in earnest what options are available to us including:

• Building Augur vNext for an existing L2.
• Building an Augur L2.
• Building an Augur L1.
• Reducing the cost of using Augur on Ethereum.
• Figuring out how to distribute the costs differently to encourage more usage without changing the net fees.
• Putting developer resources towards Ethereum core dev work to try to reduce the cost of using Augur on Ethereum.
• Any other brilliant ideas we come up with along the way.

Our current preference is to build a zkRollup Augur L2 if it looks like Ethereum is going to ossify, or build the same on some other chain that is ossified, or build ZK Augur L1. This would include private internal transfers and allow people to make wagers privately (so you don't know who the counterparty to your wager is). This is a pretty huge project though, so unlikely to be workable unless tools for building this sort of thing improve significantly or we find that our dev team has superpowers.