GnosisCrowdsouced WisdomHi Bitcointalk,
We're excited to announce (on Bitcointalk) the
Gnosis decentralized prediction market platform and oracle standard.
Gnosis enables anyone to forecast the outcome of any decidable event.
We envision a future in which markets are used to aggregate knowledge and optimize processes throughout information economies. Gnosis provides a foundational platform for the implementation of such markets. Potential applications are limitless, ranging from insurance and governance solutions to sports betting and financial instruments. Each particular application requires a unique user experience which is why we have designed our platform from the ground up to be customizable.
Gnosis has been in development for a year and a half and has been running on the Ethereum Main Network for over five months. It was founded by Martin Koeppelmann and Stefan George, who previously built and cofounded
http://fairlay.com/, a centralized Bitcoin prediction market. To this point, we have been incubated by
ConsenSys a decentralized application development studio.
We have recently opened a slack for the community. Signups are here:
http://slack.gnosis.pm/We're excited to hear your feedback, see you in the community, and answer any questions!
This post will evolve constantly as new information becomes available and new questions come up. If you have a question that has not been answered here, go ahead and ask here, on our
Slack, or on out
forum. Common questions will be added to this post.
What is Gnosis?Gnosis.pm is a decentralized prediction market built on the Ethereum protocol. Gnosis provides an open platform for anyone to predict the outcome of any event and plans to drastically simplify the creation of customized prediction market applications. We view financial and betting applications as ripe for innovation using our open and decentralized model. Our vision is a future in which prediction markets are used to optimize an incredible range of processes and to provide a platform for information sales. Gnosis is a ConsenSys backed project and was founded by Martin Koeppelmann and Stefan George, who previously founded and built Fairlay.com, a centralized Bitcoin prediction market. Together with ConsenSys we are excellently positioned to execute on our ambitious vision.
If you'd like to learn more about gnosis and prediction markets, we have some great articles on the Gnosis
blog;
Martkets for the Future, and
Markets for Security are a good starting point.
What is Ethereum?Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.
These apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property. This enables developers to create markets, store registries of debts or promises, move funds in accordance with instructions given long in the past (like a will or a futures contract) and many other things that have not been invented yet, all without a middle man or counterparty risk
1.
Ethereum allows censorship resistant execution of smart contracts, which secures users as well as market makers on our platform and makes our software globally available.
1 https://www.ethereum.org
What is a prediction market?A prediction market allows users to buy and trade binary positions on the outcome of any arbitrary event. "According to most experts in economics and finance, speculative markets are exemplary info institutions. That is, active speculative markets do very well at inducing people to acquire info, share it via trades, and collect that info into consensus prices that persuade wider audiences." (
Hanson 2013) As such, prediction markets provide an interesting, and potentially more accurate, oracle for the outcome of future events as well as for the reporting of the outcomes of past events.
* Hanson 2013 - Futarchy: Shall We Vote on Values, But Bet on Beliefs?
What is the difference between Gnosis and Augur?The two main differences are:
1. Gnosis is a platform for prediction market applications. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for 3rd party developer to build prediction market applications which are all based on the same liquidity pool.
2. As a platform Gnosis is oracle agnostic. We support all kind of oracles, centralized, decentralized or combinations.
Find more details in this
blogpost.
Will all markets be priced in Gnosis tokens?No - a market creator can choose any token they like - Gnosis is currency/token agnostic. Gnosis tokens are only relevant for the fees that the Gnosis system will charge. All fees can be paid with the token the market is traded in or alternatively with WIZ. It will always be possible for an end user to use a Gnosis application without caring about Gnosis tokens.
Will Gnosis be available on other Blockchains other than Ethereum?The Gnosis team is deeply involved in the Ethereum community. Nonetheless is our main goal to build a successful prediction market platform. Currently, Ethereum is to us very clearly the best choice to reach this goal. But we can imagine a future in 3-5 years in which a platform like Gnosis can become blockchain agnostic and operate across multiple underlying blockchains. It is also possible that this will be realised purely within Ethereum whereby different shards would be equivalent to different blockchains with different trade-offs for different parameters.
How will trading on Gnosis work?At its core a prediction market does two things - it allows to create predictive assets (tokens that represent a specific real world even and which will have a guaranteed value of 1 unit if this outcome happens - 0 otherwise) and second the trading of those assets. Since Gnosis is an open platform those assets can be traded on any exchange (decentralized exchanges, centralised exchanges or even services like “Shapeshift”). However - predictive assets have some properties which make some market mechanisms more effective - like the use of automated market makers that guarantee to provide liquidity. Those mechanisms will be the focus of the Gnosis team but will actively contribute to making predictive assets tradable on many places. You can find a bunch of fairly technical discussion around this topic here (
https://forum.gnosis.pm/c/technical).
What is the current status of Gnosis?Gnosis is currently in early stage beta and is geared towards developers for the time being. You can find the code on our
GitHub.
We have three live versions right now, each with different purposes:
- Live main-net beta: This version is live on the main-net using real ETH. It is designed to be a real-life test case for the economics of the gnosis platform.
- Test-net beta: The test net version exists so that you can try to break things without any financial risk.
- Uport version: Another main-net test, this one is designed to test our uPort integration.
Where can we meet the team?Starting in 2017 we are based in Berlin. We regularly attend Ethereum related conferences and meetups all over the world.
When is the token launch and where can I find more details?We hope to be prepared for the token launch by the end of march 2017.
We will make sure to have all relevant details released to the public with plenty of time for review prior to the start of the token launch.
There are already some articles explaining the mechanics of the token launch up on our blog;
What are Gnosis Tokens?,
Introducing the Gnosis Tokens (GNO and WIZ), and
Why so complicated?.
Why are there two tokens and can you explain the difference between GNO and WIZ?There are two separate tokens on the Gnosis platform to accomplish two separate functions. Broadly, GNO is used to incentivize long-term participation in the platform, while WIZ is used to interact with the platform.
Gnosis Wisdom (WIZ) can be used to pay platform fees on the Services layer, subsidize the fees of other participants, provide initial subsidies for markets, or for market trading. WIZ will be pegged to $1 USD worth of fees. In this way, WIZ acts as a coupon for $1 of use within Gnosis.
Gnosis tokens (GNO) are the generator for Wisdom token (WIZ) creation. WIZ can only be created via activating the utility of the Gnosis (GNO) tokens. This is done via a smart contract system. The smart contract works as follows: GNO token holders agree to “lock” their tokens in a smart contract (30–365 days). A multiplier is added for longer lock durations. The smart contract determines the user selected lock duration and applies that duration to a formula that is designed to regulate the supply of WIZ tokens currently in use. Prior to locking their GNO tokens in the smart contract, users will be able to see exactly how much WIZ they will receive as a result of executing the smart contract. Once users execute the contract, 30% of their WIZ will be distributed for immediate use, and the remaining 70% will be distributed proportionally over the locked duration. Once the lock duration expires, the locked GNO ceases to generate WIZ and the GNO becomes freely transferable by the holder. There is no limit (other than duration) for how many times GNO tokens may be used to create WIZ.
How will the token launch work?There are two great articles up on our blog post that explain the token launch in some detail;
Introducing the Gnosis Token Launch and
Why so complicated?.
Exactly 9 million GNO tokens will be created during the token launch, which will use a modified dutch auction mechanism. This essentially means the value of each token will start out ridiculously high and slowly get cheaper over time. Participants place a bid at the maximum value they are comfortable with and the token launch ends when one of two conditions is met; 1.5M ETH* is contributed or 9M GNO tokens are sold.
EVERYONE PAYS THE SAME PRICE! No matter when you place a bid, you will pay the same price as every other participant. For those that bid early, this means you will get more tokens for you contribution than you originally expected for your contribution.
So what happens if 1.5M* ETH is contributed before 9M GNO tokens are sold? Any excess tokens not sold during the token launch will be held by the team and used to support and grow the gnosis ecosystem.
*Due to the recent $/ETH price increase we will lower the cap significantly. The new cap will be announced when we announce the date for the auction.
If I bid early will I pay a higher price per token?No - everyone will get the same price, which is the price of the lowest accepted bid.
So if I get a lower price will ETH be refunded?No - you will just get more tokens. E.g. if you decide to buy 10 tokens and you are willing to pay up to 1ETH per token you would send 10ETH to the contract when the price function is at 1ETH per token. If the auction is sold out then finally at a price of 0.5ETH per token it will mean that you will receive 20 tokens.
What is the token for?The core value of GNO tokens is that they will create fee credits which can be used to pay fees on Gnosis or alternatively can be used for trading in specific market. Those credits are called WIZ. You can find a detail blog post about or tokens here.
What will you do with the Ether collected in the token launch?We are striving to fulfil our mission to
source the world’s wisdom. More concretely that means that we will expand the Gnosis platform according to our roadmap. As a practical decision, we intend to hold most funds in Ether. We believe that the success of Gnosis at least in the next few years depends on the success of the Ethereum platform. In that sense, Gnosis is a bet on Ethereum. If we are taking this bet anyway it makes sense to hold Ether.
What will happen with the GNO tokens that are not sold in the auction?The Gnosis company will retain tokens not sold in the token launch. These tokens will serve three main purposes including supporting and subsidizing applications building on top of Gnosis, reserves for potential future token launches, and long term incentivization of Gnosis employees.
What is the relationship between Gnosis and ConsenSys?Gnosis is its own independent company but we have a strong relationship with ConsenSys. This includes ConsenSys holding equity in the Gnosis entity and vice versa, Gnosis founders and early employees will hold equity in ConsenSys. Most importantly, Gnosis will utilize many ConsenSys services, projects, connections, and other benefits.
A few examples of this are the wallet and identity solution uPort, the accounting solution Balanc3 to transparently keep track of the funds, and the back-end infrastructure component Infura. Additionally, ConsenSys projects such as
http://boardroom.to/ are looking into using Gnosis's Futarchy solutions.
How many tokens are there?The total amount of GNO tokens is fixed to 10 million. The amount of WIZ is flexible and depends on platform usage. The more WIZ is used in the platform to pay the platform fee the more WIZ is generated by GNO tokens. The issuance rate of WIZ per GNO is set algorithmically. The algorithms adjust the issuance rate to target 20 * the monthly average use of WIZ. If on average 1,000,000 WIZ are used to pay fees each month that would mean a target of 20,000,000 WIZ in total existence.
The coupling of WIZ issuance rate to its actual usage will ensure that WIZ does not inflate and will have a relatively stable value. Therefore it will be possible to use WIZ in some markets as a collateral. (in plain English: users can make predictions with WIZ and not just pay the fee with WIZ)
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