Today we’re officially announcing our project “Predictions by Hodl Hodl” which is now available on TESTNET — predictions.cc.

In this blog post we want to give instructions, explain how everything works, and give you some use-cases for our new project.

Let’s get everything in order.

Overview

Predictions is a project by Hodl Hodl that is a marketplace where you can go and create a contract with someone else, where the conditions of the payout depend on the outcome of a certain event. The payouts are only made in Bitcoin.

Let’s say you want to predict that the price of Bitcoin will be above $15,000 by July 2019. The other party may disagree with you. The condition of the contract states that each one of you locks 1 Bitcoin into escrow and whoever turns out to be correct in the prediction of the price of Bitcoin gets 2 bitcoins in July.

We provide you with a solution to make this possible:

An offer desk

Simply put, it’s a place where you can find other users’ predictions and create your own;

2. Escrow solution

For each contract we generate two multisig addresses, where the funds are being stored safely during the prediction contract, with two out of three keys needed for release.

3. Resolving disputes

In case of a disagreement between the two parties on the prediction contract’s outcome, Hodl Hodl intervenes and resolves the dispute.

Use cases

The use case described above is the simplest one. Here are just a few more examples from an infinite number of options:

Stock prices

You can buy public company shares, and try predicting the price of that stock. Choose any public company, e.g. Google, and predict the price of its shares by, for example, the end of 2019.

2. Oil price

If you’re long on renewable energy, you would probably expect the price of oil to fall at some point — predict when exactly.

3. Payouts to creditors of MtGox

If you’re a MtGox creditor (a Bitcoin exchange that was hacked and went bankrupt back in 2014) and awaiting the payout, you might be interested in creating a contract that says “creditors of MtGox will not be paid anything in 2019” even though your expectation is that they will be. Thus, if you get paid by MtGox, you receive bitcoins from them, but lose the ones you locked in your contract. If you don’t get paid by MtGox, you’d get some of the bitcoins that will be sort of a compensation for a longer wait period.

4. The outcome of the Champions League final

You can make the final more exciting by creating a prediction of who gets to be the Champions League winner in 2019.

5. Peter McCormack VS Craig Wright

If you follow these kinds of events and want to support either side, make a prediction of who wins the trial, or whether it goes to trial at all.

Offer creation

To make a prediction offer, simply press the “Add offer” button on the front page of the website, or on “My offers” page.

When creating offers, you have to describe the event, the outcome you predict, how many bitcoins you would like to lock in escrow and how much your counterparty should lock in escrow.

We made the process as simple as possible, and creating offers won’t take much of your time.

Please note:

Every offer is pre-moderated by Hodl Hodl admins

Your offer should not describe anything illegal

You should be as specific and unambiguous as possible when describing the event outcome

Contract workflow

When you create an offer and someone accepts it, or you accept an existing offer, a contract is created.

Let’s analyze this step by step.

Contract is created;

Right after the contract is created, Hodl Hodl generates two unique escrow addresses.

It’s worth mentioning:

We support native Bech32 SegWit addresses. This means you can send and receive the funds from escrow to Bech32 addresses when the contract is completed

This means you can send and receive the funds from escrow to Bech32 addresses when the contract is completed We generate P2SH-P2WSH SegWit multisig escrow addresses. For every contract we generate multisig addresses in SegWit format.

2. Both parties make deposits;

Both offeror and acceptor make deposits to the escrow addresses we present them with, sending funds from their own Bitcoin wallets.

3. Waiting for the event to take place;

When both counterparties have sent bitcoins to the escrow addresses and transactions are confirmed, we inform users that everything is alright, and we’re waiting for the event to take place.

4. Acknowledging the contract outcome;

Once the event has happened, we ask both parties to decide who was right and who was wrong regarding the prediction made.

Both parties are given 3 days to acknowledge this. If there’s a disagreement between them or one party doesn’t make the decision as to the outcome of the contract within 3 days, a dispute is started.

It’s also possible for both parties to declare a draw — in this case, both parties are able to refund the funds they’ve previously locked in escrow.

5. Prediction contract is now complete!

If the parties agreed on the contract outcome, the party that predicted the outcome correctly can release all locked funds from the escrow to their own Bitcoin wallet: both the funds the party itself locked and the funds that the counterparty locked.

That’s it, the workflow is as simple as that.

Dispute case

It’s worth asking, what exactly happens in case of a disagreement between the two parties in a prediction contract?

Say we have a dispute in which case Hodl Hodl intervenes and resolves the dispute by:

Analyzing the prediction contract; Verifying the event outcome; Deciding, who predicted the outcome correctly.

Administrator has the following options: either resolve the dispute in favor of one of the counterparties, or to recognize a draw.

We do not expect this scenario to be difficult or waste our resources, because every offer is pre-moderated and we apply strict rules for offer creation.

That’s it

A new milestone begins in our company’s development, we would appreciate support from your side: please share this news, send us suggestions and bugreports about this project, and be sure you’ll see more exciting things to come very soon.

Predictions on MAINNET

The mainnet version is going live in June 2019, follow our news to stay informed!

Reach us

Hodl Hodl exchange: hodlhodl.com

TESTNET Hodl Hodl exchange: testnet.hodlhodl.com

Predictions by Hodl Hodl: predictions-testnet.hodlhodl.com

TESTNET Predictions by Hodl Hodl: predictions.cc

E-mail: support@hodlhodl.com

Blog: https://medium.com/@hodlhodl

Twitter: https://twitter.com/hodlhodl

Telegram: https://t.me/HodlHodl

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/hodlhodl

Slack: https://goo.gl/zaMnCn

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hodlexchange

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgujEoZqX_FfDTLb3Uuhsdg

Hodl!