Crypto Prediction Market Augur Is Gearing Up for Its First Major Upgrade

As a venture-capital investor said in a recent interview, Augur's "Biggest pain point is user experience." This has meant that, following a brief honeymoon in which Augur attracted a flood of users, the platform's daily active user count is now solidly below 100.

As the foundation revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, the upcoming version two of Augur will include a number of improvements to the platform's inner-workings, which are meant to alleviate sources of clunkiness, confusion, extra cost and risk.

The foundation is working on changes to the Augur app's user interface.

In a Medium post describing plans for version two, which the Forecast Foundation shared with CoinDesk, Augur's developers laid out a range of changes meant to improve the experience of creating and trading on Augur markets.

Augur currently supports two versions of each trading function which, the "Normal" one, which Forecast Foundation lead developer Alex Chapman said "Doesn't really work," and one that allows the user to set the "Gas" limit after which the function will stop trading.

In version two, Augur will pool reporter fees into a single contract and auction them off for REP, the platform's native crypto token.

One example is the planned integration of the DAI stablecoin, meaning that users do not have to be exposed to major shifts in the value of ether - particularly when their funds are locked up in a market for months or years.

In theory, Augur markets can only refer to empirically verifiable, real-world events: whether it rained, whether a team won or lost, whether a coin hit a given price.

The community's "Wish list" on Reddit shows a consistent focus on making the Augur app easier to navigate at the user interface level, rather than improving the efficiency of the Augur protocol.

In the meantime, users can view, search and sort Augur markets using Predictions.