Augur launches its long-awaited v2 while REP returns remain muted

Augur, a decentralized prediction market and one of the first ICOs and projects built on Ethereum, launched its v2 protocol today. It will operate in parallel to Augur v1 and will require token holders to manually migrate their REP tokens. The upgrade includes modifications to improve the user experience: markets can be denominated in Dai to remove the volatility of ETH, “invalid” is now an outcome to solve for the case of poorly worded markets, and 0x is integrated to improve liquidity.

Why it matters

• Decentralized prediction markets have yet to attain meaningful usage. If the demand is truly there for open, censorship-resistant markets then these improvements should, in theory, capitalize on it.
• Unlike other major upgrades we’ve seen in the past year, REP did not sustain any meaningful price increase leading up to its v2 launch. This could be a result of hesitation as to the actual demand for decentralized prediction markets or that it will mostly go towards offshore exchanges such as FTX that have launched similar products.