Augur, a decentralized prediction platform on the Ethereum blockchain, has recorded over $2 million in bets on election night.
During the United States midterm election, as Augur co-founder Jeremy Gardner stated, bets placed on the outcome of US midterms initially reached $900,000 and eventually surpassed the $2 million mark.
That is, more than 60 percent of the bets Betfair, the biggest betting platform in the world, recorded throughout midterms.
“There’s $700,000 staked on Augur for today’s mid-term election. PredictIt, the leading prediction market, has $550,000. Betfair, the world’s largest betting site, has $3 million. That’s progress,” said Gardner on November 6, adding “Over $900k, excuse me.”
Growth of dApps
Since its launch on the Ethereum mainnet in July, Augur, often described as the most complex dApp on the Ethereum blockchain network, has seen a significant increase in the number of bets and active users.
In July, BKCM CEO Brian Kelly noted that the launch of Augur represented the progress Ethereum has made over the past year in terms of scalability, especially if it can handle the transaction output large dApps like Augur demand.
At the time, Augur already had millions of dollars at stake and the large amount of ETH, the native cryptocurrency of Ethereum, placed on the platform to bet on variety of subjects led investors of both the platform and the Ethereum blockchain network to be optimistic in the long-term growth of the sector.
“Augur was one of the oldest ICOs [initial coin offerings] and the platform has been in development for about two to three years now. What’s interesting about this is probably going to be one of the biggest decentralized apps launched on top of Ethereum. If Augur doesn’t slow the system down [unlike CryptoKitties] that could generally be a positive for Ethereum.”
This week, after recording a five-fold increase in the number of active users, Augur demonstrated a stake of over $2 million on a single topic that is the US midterm election, showing promising progress and growth since its mainnet release four months ago.
According to DappRadar, a platform that provides real-time data of dApps, Augur has recorded a volume of over 4,000 ETH over the last 24 hours, which is equivalent to $880,000 based on the current price of Ethereum.
The daily volume of Augur exceeds that of the five largest Ethereum-based games combined and nears that of the largest decentralized exchanges in the market including IDEX and ForkDelta.
Killer Applications of the Blockchain
Bitcoin has long been considered as a killer application of blockchain technology due to its ability to completely decentralize the process of settling payments between multiple parties.
Betting, like payment settlement, is an activity that can be performed in a purely peer-to-peer manner with distributed escrow and smart contract systems in place made possible through the utilization of Ethereum.
As the blockchain technology evolves and matures, it will be able to support more applications and maximize its potential in a selected group of areas that can benefit from decentralization.
