Editor | Lu Xiaoming
Editor | Lu Xiaoming
Recently, Veil, a prediction market platform developed based on Augur and 0x, announced that it has received a round of financing, led by Paradigm, followed by Sequoia Capital and 1confirmation.Development team member Paul Fletcher-Hill announced the funding on Medium。
Veil describes itself as “a peer-to-peer trading platform for prediction markets and derivatives on Augur.” The platform provides users with the ability to invest in and trade multiple prediction markets. Coincidentally, the Veil mainnet was released on the same day as Grin mining, January 15, 2019. The Veil team also seems to be very supportive of Grin, saying that they can be short and long Grin contracts when they launch on Veil.
Veil is built on Augur. Veil officials publicly stated on Medium that they want Veil to drive Augur and lead the mainstream of the prediction market.
Augur is a decentralized prediction market platform (according to Wikipedia's definition, the prediction market is a speculative market for the purpose of prediction), based on the Ethereum blockchain technology, users can use digital currency to make predictions and Betting and relying on the wisdom of the crowd to predict the outcome of the development of events can effectively eliminate the risks of opponents and centralization of servers, and at the same time create a global market using cryptocurrencies.
To briefly summarize, Augur is a prediction market for Ethereum. The predicted projects can be varied. After the statistical information is entered on the chain, it can be judged whether your prediction is correct.
On Augur, anyone can make a prediction, for example, release the prediction of "the results of the US presidential election". Sensitive topics like this that are close to politics can only be played on a prediction platform like Augur. Therefore, during the World Cup last year, Augur has found a playing field for some unknown and sensitive forecasting topics, so last year's World Cup also made Augur a fire.
Augur does not use a centralized server, so it is not vulnerable to the risk of third-party hacking or server failure, all transaction fees are determined by the user, so the overall cost of using this platform is much lower than other exchanges or gambling platform.
The Veil platform is based on Ethereum, the prediction market application Augur and the decentralized trading protocol 0x. Users can log in to the Ethereum wallet to participate in the prediction derivatives market and derivatives transactions. The 0x protocol is used to speed up transactions and minimize the amount of transactions that need to be sent, making transactions on the Veil platform faster and lower transaction costs. Users can create and cancel Veil orders off-chain, and Veil pays gas to continue trading on Ethereum.
Meanwhile, Veil offers instant settlement to ensure users get paid faster. Although Augur has a decentralized oracle system that can confirm the normal operation of the prediction market, this confirmation process also takes up to several weeks, while Veil has an "instant settlement" function that allows users to receive benefits immediately.
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As of 23:53 on January 28, the rate of return of some players announced on the veil website
Seeing this rate of return, Zhang Dan also tried it out with the idea of playing around. He quickly applied for a new Ethereum wallet and charged 0.5 ETH, but was stuck in the "verify wallet address" link. The Veil platform requires players to transfer ETH from the Ethereum wallet to the Veil account before they can make bet predictions. However, Zhang Dan’s Ethereum wallet address has not been verified, and the webpage has been stuck on "Verifying wallet address" for three consecutive days "Maybe because it is a new wallet address, or maybe because there are too few coins in the wallet, so it has been unable to pass the verification," Zhang Dan said.
Regarding Veil’s team, Veil’s official website does not introduce its team, and Veil’s official account on Medium only discloses three co-founders, namely Paul Fletcher-Hill, Feridun Mert Celebi and Graham Kaemmer. Among them, Paul Fletcher-Hill is the CEO of Veil. He graduated from Yale University and worked in Hill Street Labs and PatientBank. The other two co-founders, Feridun Mert Celebi and Graham Kaemmer, are also from PatientBank.
The three founders all came from PatientBank, so what kind of company is PatientBank?
According to public information, PatientBank is an online medical record storage and retrieval company invested by Y Combinator. It was established in 2014 and received a seed round of financing of US$120,000 from YC in August 2016. With the endorsement of YC, in just 4 months, on December 15, 2016, General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures led the investment, and 10 investment institutions totaled 2.2 million US dollars in seed round financing. Other investment institutions include SV Angel, Spectrum 28, and Data Collective, all of which are common investment institutions in the medical field.
The successful entrepreneurial financing experience of the three young people before may have paved the way for Veil to get investment from famous investment institutions such as Sequoia.
As part of the release on the Ethereum mainnet, Veil currently only makes a small part of the market forecast, and Veil's forecast market is positioned at"Potential market". Therefore, it has implemented a feature that allows users to nominate Augur prediction markets for the Veil platform, and users can enter the Augur market ID to apply for prediction market approval.
Veil charges a 1% fee on all trades and a 1% settlement fee for users who choose to use the instant settlement feature.
The prediction market is an important direction of DApp, and its role has not yet received enough attention. However, with the steady increase in the scale of Ethereum users and the landing of products, it may usher in a turning point in 2019 due to the industry foundation, and there is a lot of room for imagination.
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