Hi Crypto Investor, totally unrelated to today's topic, but are you familiar with Cindicator? I'm curious if you have any thoughts on it. Here are mine if anyone is interested...
It seems like Cindicator is offering a decentralized prediction market service very similar to Augur, except Augur has double the market cap ($950 million vs $430 million, and it looks to me like Cindicator has substantially more user activity than Augur.
Whereas Cindicator decides what questions to ask its crowdsourced "analysts", Augur allows anyone to pay Augur tokens to ask the crowd a question. These are two different use cases with different implications, but the big takeaway for me is that I think, for the near-future, Cindicator's top-down control of their questions will allow them to have a much easier time gamifying their platform and keeping users engaged, while Augur will struggle to achieve a critical mass of users.
I think Cindicator has an interesting token benefit structure as well, where you only gain access to their data if you hold a large amount of their coins. Seems like a plausible way to create a virtuous feedback loop between speculators and token holders.
While I'm unsure of how accurate Cindicator's data will be long-term, regardless, crowdsourced market prediction data of this sort seems valuable, especially if you can identify analysts with unusually high prediction accuracy. That seems to be the direction they're going with it.
Anyway, sorry for sharing something off-topic. Just wanted to put it on your radar if you haven't looked into it yet. No reply needed. Thanks for reading!
No, I haven't looked into Cindicator. How far is it into development? If it's not launched yet like Augur, there is yet another option out there which is even smaller - Gnosis. Of course, the reason why is because circulating supply is so much smaller than total supply, so Cindicator might still better.
It's probably better to have fewer questions like Cindicator seems to be doing (based on what you told me) than the scattershot approach Augur is taking where anyone can post them, given both will struggle with adoption. If you don't have a ton of users, the best you can do is concentrate them by having fewer prediction markets.
How is consensus reached on the outcome of an event? Same as Augur or differently? Anyway, maybe I'll look into it at some point. One point I want to say here is that all of these "prediction markets" are fancy gambling platforms, so can be good to look at other gam-ahem prediction markets that exist out there. Thanks for your comment.