Augur, the peer-to-peer prediction market platform that used to operate on Ethereum blockchain technology, has officially launched its own mainnet. This a marketplace where users can create prediction markets for certain world events and purchase shares in certain market outcomes held its ICO way back in 2015. One can create a market for almost anything: weather, politics, finance, shorting other crypto coins etc. A full description of their protocol can be found on their new official website augur.net. Or you can always read through our official summary we made a while back.
The launch was announced a couple of months ago, when it was also noted that Augur will go ahead with a hard launch where full functionality of the platform will be available to its users. Some important updates happened along the way towards today, July 9th, when Augur mainnet went live. Security audits for Augur Core have been handled in late March. A bug bounty was launched on April 4th, offering rewards of up to $200 thousand USD to anyone who managed to find “critical” bugs in the code. One high severity bug was found by @edmundedgar and Augur soon reported that the bug was fixed, as per his suggestion. A demo of the Augur UI and its functionality went live in late May.
After the main network was initiated, the previous smart contract which held the REP tokens was frozen and the balances were automatically migrated to a new smart contract. Users who had their tokens deposited on decentralized exchanges (DEX) like EtherDelta and IDEX were urged to withdraw their holdings to a different wallet or a centralized exchange, as the ones that remained on these peer-to-peer exchanges will become invalid after the mainnet launch. Centralized exchange and hardware wallet tokens weren’t required to be moved.
The launch was officially confirmed on July 9th, at 11:15 (UTC+1), as announced by a tweet from Augur’s official Twitter account:
“REP is frozen. The migration is underway.
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x247bad06dbb96daaf7026f2c2330de02fc6960911209dd776b0a1fe5dc8f2149 …”
The project will now continue to move onto its new mainnet’s smart contract, with the balances about to be replicated 1:1 to all REP token holders on the newly deployed production REP token contract. The migration will take estimated 8-10 hours. Augurs Medium post informs us further:
“There will be a follow up blog post as soon as a complete and successful migration has been confirmed. The post will include the final release of Augur App, the new production REP token contract address, and the Augur contract addresses.”
The biggest post-mainnet launch concern remains the host network Ethereum, it’s still unclear if it will be able to handle the additional traffic or if it will experience another Cryptokitties situation. If you are a fan of the project or simply interested in its further developments, head on to their official Medium/Twitter page to get further information.
Augur’s price hasn’t reacted to the launch as of yet, which can be understandable when you consider that the coins are still locked up and untradeable. The coin is currently traded at $34.50 USD which is a 0.53% increase in the last 24 hours. As of this moment, Augur remains the 36th most valuable cryptocurrency in the world with a market cap of $379,493,400 USD.
