CryptoCurrency: Gnosis
Based on Ethereum — The next generation blockchain network. Speculate on anything with an easy-to-use prediction market.
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 risk1.
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.
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.
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.
