Skin in the game: How MedCredits is using Augur to Assure Accountabilityhttps://medium.com/medcredits/skin-in-the-game-how-medcredits-is-using-augur-to-assure-accountability-950166f1f0abAccountability is a big problem for ICOs. Unlike private equity deals, token holders have little control over use of ICO funds and early platform direction. Now, with the release of Augur’s prediction market, there may be a way for companies to provide potential token holders with some assurances.
Team experience, white paper, development progress and company milestones are a few important metrics used when considering participation in an ICO. Team experience and white papers can be assessed prior to buying tokens. Development progress and company milestones, however, tend to be harder to measure as the majority of work tends to occur after the ICO. Token holders often have little choice but to trust the timelines put forth by companies.
Months after the ICO craze, token holders are realizing that they were duped by project “roadmaps” as companies now proceed to announce delay after delay in development milestones.
The problem is that companies with upcoming ICOs often have ulterior motives. ICOs with imminent roadmap milestones are more appealing to token buyers than ICOs with more realistic and distant goals. Companies know this, and dangle these milestones just down the road from token distribution.
Even those companies with purer intentions, but less versed in the development of decentralized protocols, are now discovering that their ambitious road maps are not feasible. This is further compounded by the challenges faced in blockchain development. Decentralized apps require carefully laid out incentive structures and often lack the developer tools readily available in traditional development.
The issue of accountability is not new. There are a number of projects attempting to provide greater transparency. Messari is a startup that aims to provide the public with an open data library for cryptoassets. As another solution, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently proposed a fund raising mechanism called a DAICO, which funds teams based on the achievement of project landmarks. To date though, there is not a robust solution that is ready for implementation.
Until better accountability measures exist, potential token buyers may be reluctant to purchase utility or protocol tokens instead of equity. Augur’s prediction market may provide a solution that, in part, remedies this.
For the first time, it is possible for ICO companies to assure their commitment to project timelines by putting money where their mouths are in prediction markets on Augur. While one can never perfectly predict development hurdles, there are basic project milestones that teams should be able to confidently deliver.
MedCredits aims to be the first to do this by creating a market on Augur that signals the release of its Hippocrates medical app on Ethereum mainnet by October 15th, 2018. The MedCredits founders intend to place a 25 ETH bid (10,750 USD) that Hippocrates will be released according to this schedule.
The Hippocrates dApp is the first decentralized medical app to be deployed within the MedCredits Health System and must meet the following 5 objective criteria by October 15th, 2018:
- Hippocrates contracts deployed on Ethereum Mainnet
- Smart contracts guide the patient and physician encounter
- Patient medical records are encrypted and stored on IPFS
- ETH is a payment option within the Hippocrates dApp
Doctors are available to diagnose and provide medical recommendations to patients
If the above criteria are met by the above date, then MedCredits will have successfully launched the Hippocrates dApp. Reporters on Augur should use the above criteria to verify this outcome.
Currently the Hippocrates dApp is in public beta testing. If you would like to try the dApp, it can be found at
https://hippocrates.medcredits.io. Currently, payment is in test MEDX tokens which you can request in our telegram channel.
At MedCredits we believe in launching real decentralized applications. Most of our core team has personally invested in cryptocurrency for over 5 years now. For the past 18 months, we have been busy building the first truly decentralized healthcare system — MedCredits. Going forward, we want to give our community assurances that our timeline goals will be met. We aim to create additional markets under the category MedCredits on Augur for a number of our future milestones as they approach.
