Veil, the San Francisco-based developer of a decentralized prediction market and derivatives platform, has created an updated version of Augur’s prediction market protocol.

Veil’s new application, called AugurLite, has reportedly been developed to facilitate bets which will be placed on the upcoming US presidential elections.

“No One Has Been Able To Support Long-Running Markets On Augur”

While speaking at the recently held Token Summit Conference in New York, Paul Fletcher-Hill, the co-founder and CEO at Veil, remarked:

What we’ve done, is very recently we wanted to support the 2020 elections. … No one has been able to support long-running markets on Augur, so what we’ve done is take some of the infrastructure to run [AugurLite].

Although the Ethereum-based Augur network can normally handle long-running markets, the decentralized prediction market platform’s developers are planning to release a major update. The upcoming upgrades to Augur’s codebase are expected to be activated at some later point this year.

As confirmed in a Medium blog post, published in October 2018, Augur’s upcoming upgrade will require that all existing REP tokens, which are used to place bets on the platform, be migrated or transferred to a new set of smart contracts.

Veil To Support Markets While Augur Is Upgraded

Launching new prediction markets on Augur at this point would make any bets placed “susceptible to dispute,” as the platform will be undergoing upgrades. This, according to Fletcher-Hill, who noted that Veil would continue to support markets opened on Augur’s mainnet and also extend support for the platform’s upcoming updates.

Clarifying that AugurLite was developed in order to allow users to participate in decentralized prediction markets, as the Augur mainnet is being upgraded, Fletcher-Hill also mentioned: 

[AugurLite] is not a generalizable fork, it’s merely something our users had asked for these 2020 markets.

Founded in August 2018, Veil provides users an intuitive web-based interface to issue bets on various Augur-based prediction markets, with significant improvements in speed. As noted by Veil’s management, it is easier to place bets using Veil as the platform offers instant settlements in cases where the outcome of the wagers can already be pre-determined (or there’s a high probability that the bet will result in a particular outcome).

AugurLite Depends On Prediction Market Creator To Obtain Data

As confirmed in an tweet from Veil’s official Twitter account, the platform’s developers have launched trading for the upcoming US 2020 Democratic presidential nominee markets.

As stated on its Github page, AugurLite is different from the main Augur platform as it is based on a different type of oracle service. Notably, oracles are used to obtain real-world data, which is then registered on blockchain networks.

Augur’s prediction markets have their own oracle service, which ensures that data being sent to the application is secure and accurate. In comparison, AugurLite does not have a native oracle service, as it depends on the prediction market creator to obtain data from external sources.

No Built-In Oracle

According to AugurLite’s GitHub page:

No oracle is built into the protocol. Instead, markets have a resolver which can reference any oracle—an Augur market, Chainlink feed, or any arbitrary smart contract state.

The Github page also clarifies:

No trading happens through the protocol. The ERC20 outcome tokens should be traded on other protocols like 0x or Hydro. Relayers like Veil, BlitzPredict, or Flux can provide UX.