The Ethereum-based predictions platform Veil is shutting down, according to an official Medium post on July 11.
As
of July 11, no new markets will be added to the platform. Trading will
be disabled entirely on July 24. Veil co-founder Paul Fletcher-Hill
recommended that users redeem open positions, withdraw positions from
active markets, and withdraw Veil Ether and convert it to Ether.
Veil was a type of extension to the Ethereum-based predictions market Augur. Augur
is a predictions market — that still exists — that uses smart contracts
to let users create and bet on the outcome of any event with the
cryptocurrency Ether.
For instance, the top three bets listed on the Augur market,
at press time, are “Will Novak Djokovic be the 2019 Wimbledon Men's
Singles winner?,” “Who will Win the The First Democratic Primary
Debate?,” and “Will Serena Williams be the 2019 Wimbledon Women's
Singles winner?”
In April, Augur also added the option to use the stablecoin by MakerDAO, DAI, on its platform.
According to its website,
Veil was intended to “bring Augur mainstream” and improve user
experience by speeding up its transaction processes. Veil purportedly
let users trade on the Augur marketplace faster via the 0x protocol, and
provided instant settlement by allowing users to sell their shares to
Veil before native finalization of Augur transactions on the blockchain.
In
discussing the reasons Veil did not meet its success goals,
Fletcher-Hill noted a number of issues, including that the platform may
not have been friendly enough to crypto novices:
“We
didn’t offer a good onboarding experience. Crypto as a user base is
still early, and we didn’t make it easy enough for users without crypto
or a wallet to get started.”
Some other areas of
concern he noted include not being decentralized, not being regulated,
and perhaps trying to offer too many options as a broad-scale
predictions market. Fletcher-Hill wrote:
“… ultimately
we failed to find a good fit between what we were building and the
market as it exists today. … But today the community of users is small,
and we think there are higher impact products and services we can build
for the immediate future.”
As previously reported
by Cointelegraph, Augur came under fire from Reddit and major crypto
exchange Binance due to having an apparent design flaw. The flaw apparently allows users to run scams, of sorts, by issuing predictions with unclear or contradictory conditions for resolution.
Binance
also said that low liquidity, barebones functionality, complex
mechanics, and an unclear approach to governance were additional issues
it saw with Augur.
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