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Source: medium.com ·
Veil has launched on Ethereum’s Mainnet. Veil is a peer-to-peer prediction market and derivatives platform built on top of Augur, 0x, and Ethereum. Login to Veil using your Ethereum wallet or signup…
Erik Voorhees - @ErikVoorhees
4 months ago
Veil is live on Mainnet by @pfletcherhill https://t.co/apsxOu00j1 #augur #ethereum #crypto #blockchain
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Josh Stark - @0xstark
6 months ago
RT @veil: Veil is LIVE on Mainnet! 🚀
Start trading now at https://t.co/tVBiX8jaM6.
Or sign up for an account at https://t.co/GV8PrLvR0j.
https://t.co/EOdj1O6kd7
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scott lewis - @scott_lew_is
6 months ago
RT @veil: Veil is LIVE on Mainnet! 🚀
Start trading now at https://t.co/tVBiX8jaM6.
Or sign up for an account at https://t.co/GV8PrLvR0j.
https://t.co/EOdj1O6kd7
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Alok Vasudev - @AlokVasudev
6 months ago
RT @veil: Veil is LIVE on Mainnet! 🚀
Start trading now at https://t.co/tVBiX8jaM6.
Or sign up for an account at https://t.co/GV8PrLvR0j.
https://t.co/EOdj1O6kd7
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Eric Meltzer - @wheatpond
6 months ago
very cool. https://t.co/AnaNFQpPro
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Uberse
6 months ago
We are told here that "Due to legal and regulatory considerations, Veil will first be launching in limited jurisdictions." I assume though that residents of those areas (which includes Cuba Syria, North Korea, the Crimea region, and especially that world terrorist pariah calling itself "the United States") can still access Veil using Tor?
Also, I seem to remember Veil instituting something like a back-door kill switch, like Augur did -- something that makes its alpha version completely decentralized. True?
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laugrig
6 - 7 years account age. 700 -1000 comment karma. 6 months ago
Love the UI, but the markets are pretty much non-existent.
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laugrig
6 - 7 years account age. 700 -1000 comment karma. 6 months ago
How do you plan to address this? Would be interested in contributing.
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pfletcherhill
1 - 2 year account age. -15 - 35 comment karma. 6 months ago
Biggest things right now are support for more Ethereum wallets and education. Augur markets aren't intuitive, and our UI still has a long way to go to make it clear what you're buying/selling, at what price, and with what potential gain/loss. I also don't think the community has taken advantage of the API yet. Some things you could build with API (off top of my head):
* Strategy that checks most recent Oscars predictions and makes limit orders on Veil accordingly ([https://www.goldderby.com/awardshows/expert-predictions/oscars-nominations-2019/sort/recent/](https://www.goldderby.com/awardshows/expert-predictions/oscars-nominations-2019/sort/recent/))
* Strategy that checks future BTC price on BitMex and trades on Veil
* Simple market maker using EMA built form most recent data from Veil's data feeds ([https://veil.co/feeds](https://veil.co/feeds))
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twitterologist
6 months ago
Wrote down some initial impressions from Veil at https://dyor.io/veil-market-first-impressions
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msagansk
4 - 5 years account age. 250 - 500 comment karma. 6 months ago
ETH is escrowed when you make a trade.
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_dredge
6 months ago
But what if the payouts are larger than the quantity of ETH held in escrow?
(e.g. take a short position on BTC/USD and then all crypto assets fall)
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pfletcherhill
1 - 2 year account age. -15 - 35 comment karma. 6 months ago
This is a feature of Augur. The Augur smart contracts will not create a set of shares (i.e. one long and one short) unless 1 ETH is escrowed in the Augur market contract. When a market is finalized, the payout for those two shares is again 1 ETH. What matters though is the distribution of the 1 ETH across the two (all for one or split), but the max payout will be 1 ETH.
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Right now Augur (and in turn Veil) uses ETH for trading—all collateral is ETH. So while you may gain back the same amount of ETH or make more ETH, the price of ETH may have changed with respect to USD. Augur v2 is supposed to use Dai as collateral to provide more stability, but that's one consideration for the short term.
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Does that answer your question?
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_dredge
6 months ago
Augur works fine for binary events (is btc/usd price > x then pay 1 eth) but for a spread of events there must be a limit as each augur contract pays a maximum of 1 eth. Also, if you want to go short btc, you don't want your payout to be in a currency highly correlated to btc.
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atLeastAverage
6 months ago
This is going to become everything I hoped for. I kicked around a little and I love it.
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zantho
6 months ago
Fantastic! Anything that works around the terrible Augur interface is good news!
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ninja_batman
6 months ago
Any idea why an 'account' is necessary? I thought that was one of the benefits of crypto..
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ItsAConspiracy
6 months ago
Can you sign in with just an account before having ETH? A lot of people are trying to ease the onboarding process so people can jump right in, instead of installing a client and buying ETH on Coinbase before they can do anything.
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DDDNN
6 months ago
The account creation doesn't even require other information than email (which is good) but why even have it in the first place then. One of the things like the most about dapps is that no specific account is required since you already have a wallet that is usable everywhere.
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blackestadder
6 months ago
Serious question: Why are you building this on top of Augur at all?
- Veil is not permissionless to use. You seem to require customers to "white-list" their ethereum addresses, which requires an email-based registration process. You are even blocking entire countries.
- Veil bypasses Augur's on-chain orderbook in favor of a centralized 0x-based off-chain relayer.
- Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe Veil shares or consumes liquidity from the Augur orderbook, except indirectly via arbitrage.
- Veil defines the rules and conditions for markets, and does not allow users to create free-form markets (though I see in your blog post you are considering allowing other markets in the future).
- Veil acts as the oracle with "instant settlement" by buying out customer positions early.
I can only think of a couple advantages:
- You can raise funds from VCs who have drunk the Augur kool-aid for whatever reason.
- If users don't like the prices you offer to settle at, they can appeal to the Augur dispute system. Of course this arbitration is far from ideal, locking up funds for months and putting yourself at the mercy of the REP mob. Disputing would probably also be very risky because Veil will be the adversary in any dispute, and they have a privileged position in the Augur eco-system and are backed by VCs with deep REP pockets.
Am I missing any other reasons to build on top of Augur? Because it just seems like a really expensive, slow, and unpredictable back-end for a derivatives platform, especially one that is centralized to the degree yours is. Don't get me wrong, some degree of centralization is clearly needed here, I just don't see what Augur is bringing to the table for this project.
In any case, good luck!
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Uberse
6 months ago
What an odd post.
> You seem to require customers to "white-list" their ethereum addresses, which requires an email-based registration process. You are even blocking entire countries.
No, the U.S. gov't is requiring them to white-list and block -- see [this](https://www.coindesk.com/get-ready-for-crypto-sanctions-enforcement).
>Of course, this arbitration is far from ideal, locking up funds for months and putting yourself at the mercy of the REP mob . . .
Rep mob? Oh, you mean the people who *bought* Reps and have an interest in ensuring that the system they bought into works correctly. Oh, and you can sell your stake in the outcome at any time. No need to wait for months if you don't want to. It's a *market*, you see.
>Disputing would probably also be very risky because Veil will be the adversary in any dispute, and they have a privileged position in the Augur eco-system and are backed by VCs with deep REP pockets.
Suddenly they're not a mob anymore. But even (or especially) VCs with deep REP pockets would also have an interest in maintaining the integrity of their investment.
> Don't get me wrong, some degree of centralization is clearly needed here, I just don't see what Augur is bringing to the table for this project.
Uh, Augur *built* the table. The question is what Veil brings to *it.* As you say, it brings with it a degree of centralization, which has its advantages and disadvantages.
> \[Augur\] just seems like a really expensive, slow, and unpredictable back-end for a derivatives platform . . .
It's expensive if the outcome you bought into is wrong. If you win its profitable.
Its slow if you need or want to wait for the dispute-cycle "mob" of "VCs with deep REP pockets" to complete their dark work.
It's unpredictable when the markets themselves are based on unpredictable events, as opposed to markets that incentivize people with insider info -- like [those](http://wisdomofcrowds.blogspot.com/2009/12/stock-market-reaction-to-challenger.html) who sold Morton Thiokol stock immediately after the Challenger disaster almost exactly 33 years ago.
> You can raise funds from VCs who have drunk the Augur kool-aid for whatever reason.
I'd say you have drunk the anti-Augur kool-aid for a very specific reason: you didn't buy REPS during their crowd-sale and can't afford to buy enough of them now.
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blackestadder
6 months ago
>Uh, Augur *built* the table.
I think you may have missed the point of my post: no, they didn't.
In order to make a usable system, Veil has had to replace almost all of Augur's system, including the user interface, market creation, the orderbook, and the oracle.
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BeezLionmane
6 months ago
Market creation, shares, the oracle, all still go through Augur itself. The only thing different is the UI and the orderbook, which uses 0x rather than on-chain. It's still using Augur.
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cankisagun
6 months ago
The fact that Veil and Augur don't share an order book or liquidity is an interesting thing to be aware of when assessing the impact of this for both projects. Veil is a much easier way to interact with from a UX perspectiove (compared to Augur) but in these products liquidity is king. I am skeptical how Augur benefits from a fundamental network level (i.e. increased demand for REP or network activity), besides creating a strong signal towards ecosystem growth. Speculation on Veil has no impact on Augur markets
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pfletcherhill
6 months ago
Depends what you think Augur is. If you think it's a product for trading, then no, liquidity isn't immediately shared and there's not much benefit. But if you think Augur is a decentralized truth machine/oracle, then I think there's a lot of benefit, because it increases the amount of money in the world that depends on Augur telling the truth and reporting on markets correctly. Veil has Instant Settlement to offer users faster payment in some markets, but it's not a replacement for Augur as an oracle.
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ntomaino
6 months ago
paul and team can better address your specific questions, but i'm one of the investors involved in the project and thought i'd share my 2 cents
the simple answer for why build on top of augur imo is that there's a strong protocol and community behind augur
you're right in your assessment that as a centralized company, you can't directly benefit from a lot of the killer features a community owned and operated protocol can. A truly open, global product is not achievable
when you're a company that needs to comply with different regulations around the world. This was also the case when we launched coinbase to make it easy to buy and use btc; a lot of the purists thought (and still think) that coinbase was useless, because users can't get any of the true benefits of cryptocurrency (open, global, censorship resistant) when using the product. if you go back to r/bitcoin in 2013 a lot of this sentiment was shared.
the reality though is that while there are many disadvantages to being centralized when building financial products, there's one major advantage: you can coordinate quicker and build a better product faster. this is what the veil team has done; they started on this less than 6 months ago and in a short period of time have built a quality product for people in the appropriate jurisdictions to get exposure to augur markets.
they certainly don't \*need\* to be on augur and i suspect that they shift to another prediction market protocol if a better one emerged, but i think there can be a positive symbiotic relationship btw augur and veil where veil benefits from from momentum of the protocol and community around augur and augur benefits from gaining a lot of new users who the lower level app is too clunky to use
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blackestadder
6 months ago
I appreciate your response, thank you. You're right I hadn't accounted for the benefit of leveraging Augur's community.
And I agree that if Veil becomes widely used there is a good chance they will shift to another prediction market protocol.
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Poyo-Poyo
6 months ago
please press F.
this man had been writing this thing up for weeks getting it ready for this moment.
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throwawayp892734089
6 months ago
I think they plan to do things besides derivatives markets, it's just hard to do anything else for now because bets still use ETH instead of DAI.
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laugrig
6 months ago
I would've taken your comments more seriously if your Reddit account was not 3 days old.
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Tyre77
6 months ago
This feels like one of the first crypto projects built as a product company vs. an infrastructure company selling to other crypto-enthusiasts. It's cool to see third-layer products built on lower level protocols (0x and Augur, themselves built on Ethereum). Definitely makes a stronger case for the potential impact of Ethereum and crypto.
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pfletcherhill
6 months ago
Still having issues? Jump into the Veil discord for support: [https://discord.gg/aBfTCVU](https://discord.gg/aBfTCVU)
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