Augur didn’t exactly experience price movements of a currency you would have liked to own during the last couple of months. Peaking on August 1st at $31.04/411289 satoshi, the currency has been in a perennial downtrend ever since. Initially losing half of its value and dropping to $15.18/251215 satoshi on the 14th of August, REP slightly bounced and went into a sideways pattern which ended abruptly on September 5th. The currency fell to monthly lows of $12.21/194877 satoshi on the 18th and hasn’t been showing many signs of life from there onwards.
One REP can be purchased for $13.23 USD (0.92% rise in the last 24 hours)/198847 satoshi (-0.86% drop in the last 24 hours). A daily trade volume of 538 BTC is nothing to write home about, most of it coming from Bithumb (51%) and Binance (18%). With a market cap of $145,223,764, Augur is currently the 47th most valuable cryptocurrency on the market.
Trader ma5id from TradingView is seemingly a massive fan of Augur, as he keeps churning out charts for this cryptocurrency almost weekly. His latest analysis was triangle-based and included a long-term overview of the currency:
“Long expectation, RSI still in the middle and MACD still in long,” said the trader. Check out his complete analysis here.
This prediction market protocol hasn’t exactly lit the crypto world on fire since its launch. The initial novelty of the platform seems to have waned, as data from DappRadar indicates that Augur experienced a 90% drop-off in user numbers.
Augur had 25 users in the last 24 hours.
Roughly one person per hour.
That's a 90% drop in users since launch week back in July.
Augur is currently the 44th ranked ETH dApp by users. pic.twitter.com/I8fGLKxLcx
— Kevin Rooke (@kerooke) September 19, 2018
The biggest reason for this was apparently the complicated nature of setting up and running the Augur client. In the tweet thread posted above, many potential Augur users complained that the app failed to sync properly and simply gave up trying after a while. This was probably a part of Augur development team deciding to recently come out with v1.5.0 version of their app. They describe the latest release with the following:
“It has been waaay too long since our last release, but this one is worth it! We have a slick new redesign in this version, and behind the scenes there was a lot of code refactoring done.
- Redesign!
- Sprinkled in react and redux magic for view/state management
- Augur-app has been updated to use the webpack toolchain
- light node client app fixes
- Volume is now shown in terms of ETH and shares are expressed as ShareVolume”
The complete release can be found here.
The team also mentioned in their weekly report that work is being done on Augur v2. The team gives a short TL;DR of v2 — The use of DAI is planned, implementation of use it or lose it for REP (in a fork), using an auction system for the REP price oracle, replacing participation tokens with a buyback/burn system, faster disputing, API fixes, bug fixes and more features will be introduced in the upcoming software update.
?Want to know what are asic miners worth buying?
Augur will be engaged in some community activities in the upcoming period. ETH San Francisco event (October 5th-7thwill have a competition in building a project using Augur and there is a “special prize” promised for whoever wins it. Project’s developer Scott Bigelow will be visiting TruufleCon and, alongside Alan Krassowski of Consensys, delivering a speech titled “Unobvious Ethereum Hacks”. If you are interested in Ethereum/Solidity/EVM security and would like to learn about sneaky, underhanded hacks and how to avoid them, be sure to check that out.
Finally, a writer named Ben Davidow produced a think piece titled “Prediction Arbitrage: Price Gap Opportunities Between Augur & Other Markets” whose title is pretty self-explanatory. He reveals that blockchain “prediction markets” are still relatively young and as more and more of them start popping up, there will be price discrepancies based on various factors like the availability of information, individual preferences, lag in market adjustment etc. Check out the publication here.
At the end of the day, Augur is a rather interesting project that is currently experiencing some growing pains that are pretty common in today’s blockchain industry. Lack of commercial availability and simplicity of use has made many a head turn away from crypto and this case is no different. Making their product more available to the average consumer will likely be their no.1 priority in the future.
