Decentralized Betting Platform Augur Forked by Veil to Create Prediction Markets for 2020 Elections

The election season is heating up again and many people are looking to benefit from it. One of them is a prediction market and derivatives platform Veil. Veil Market leverages the Augur, 0x, and Ethereum protocols to provide a peer-to-peer trading platform for prediction markets and derivatives.

Today we launched trading for 2020 Democratic presidential nominee markets denominated in Dai. https://t.co/xjZOkRdryq

— Veil (@veil) May 15, 2019

Veil co-founder and CEO Paul Fletcher-Hill announces on a Medium post.

“Two of the most common requests we get our support for Dai and markets on the 2020 US presidential election. Today we’re very excited to launch both. You can now bet on who will win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination with Dai, Maker’s decentralized stable currency.”

Veil has used the Augur protocol for defining markets and holding funds and depended on Augur’s decentralized oracle for resolving markets. While Veil intends to support Augur v2, its impending release has prevented users from creating long-running markets on the current version of Augur. Consequently, Veil has deployed a new version of Augur that lets the developers create markets in arbitrary denomination tokens (Dai, in this case) and resolve them using Augur v2 when it is released.

It will be called AugurlLite.

Drawbacks of AugurLite

Joey Krug, an insider of Augur took to Twitter to criticize this move by Veil. He said:

“Companies building on @AugurProject are making the same mistakes they made when building on 0x. Short term greed as opposed to long. The only one that isn’t that I’ve seen is @guesserio. And I’m not an investor in any of them atm, so this is my own viewpoint.”

Context: Veil forked Augur and released an AugurLite today with all of the main benefits of Augur removed (it enables stuff Gnosis could do 3 years ago, side note idk why they didn’t just use Gnosis). So I’m also speaking as the largest contributor/core dev to AugurLite ;)

— Joey Krug (@joeykrug) May 15, 2019

He continued by saying:

“Augur has a few value propositions: no limit, low fees, global liquidity, and being trustless is an important component of enabling that. Companies like Veil compromise on all 3. Choosing from multiple centralized oracles is like saying choosing from multiple banks is equivalent to bitcoin. A third party oracle can literally pay themselves out and steal all the funds and there’s a little financial incentive not to, or they can be hacked, pressured/forced, etc.”

He goes on to call global liquidity a critical issue.

“So Veil has now deployed a centralized trusted version of Augur to the Ethereum mainnet. It has 0 to do with the original Augur vision, and to call it AugurLite is extremely misleading. It’d be like calling EOS EthereumLite or Ripple BitcoinLite. Way different.”

He goes on to say that if he were operating Veil, he would bite the bullet and admit that almost no benefits from blockchain technology. Instead, they should focus on building a centralized competitor to Betfair or Predictit or Nadex.