Ethereum-based Prediction Market Service Gnosis Launches in Beta
| Updatedby Polina Chernykh · 3 min read
Gnosis, a forecasting service that will allow people to find out what will happen in the future, is planned to be launched in beta.
The beta version of the new decentralised prediction market, named Gnosis, is expected to be launched later this week. Built by Stefan George and Martin Köppelman, the platform will enable users to place bids on the outcome of the future events, including political elections and sports games.
Gnosis will serve as an oracle, allowing people to create events and finance them as single investors or launch a crowdfunded campaign.
“Gnosis enables anyone, anywhere, to speculate on the outcome of events with financial incentive,” Matt Liston, a startgeist at Gnosis, told Cointelegraph. “It is an indispensable tool to create more efficient information economies. Applications of Gnosis are incredibly wide ranging, from more flexible and efficient sports betting and financial instruments, to novel forms of governance, insurance, action incentivization, information aggregation, and much more!”
“The Gnosis platform will enable anyone to create new applications very easily. Our goal is to make this process as simple as setting up a new Facebook page. Gnosis will serve as a toolset and shared liquidity pool for the next generation of markets.”
The developers expect Gnosis will act as a platform for a broad range of user-created prediction markets. Currently, the website provides only general information, while its main functions are unavailable.
According to Gnosis developers, the benefits of the service is its anonymity and lack of monetary control.
The supporters of forecasting services are convinced that such projects help to reveal information that would be hidden in favor of businesses. Similar non-blockchain platforms were closed by governments or shut down because of regulatory restrictions.
There is now only one analogue of Gnosis – the Augur service. Opened in 2015, the platform received over 549,000 of Ether and 4,200 of bitcoins. The main difference between these two systems is that Augur employs several oracles to make predictions, while Gnosis uses only one. If any of the oracles disagrees with the prediction, the final decision is taken collectively at the pool of oracles.
The developers are also planning to launch a futarchy system, a two-stage voting that allows users to first select an initiative and then vote for the actions required for its implementation. The governance model will be helpful to change policy for various topics.
The futarchy mechanism creates two types of Gnosis tokens: one token has a value if the funding proposal passes (A) and the other has the value if the proposal doesn’t pass (B). The tokens will then be traded on the market. Those who doesn’t support the proposal should sell token A and hold token B, while those who agree with the proposal should keep token A and sell token B.
“In this way, the exchange rate between these tokens represents the demand for a proposal to pass or not pass. After a certain amount of time the decision is made corresponding to the token with higher value,” Liston explained.
