This week on #3Question, we hear from Stefan George, a Chief Technology Officer & Co-founder at Gnosis.

Stefan George / © blog.gnosis.pm

According to d10e.biz, Stefan is an entrepreneur and developer who became interested in Bitcoin in 2013. He started his own Bitcoin startup Fairlay.com, one of the leading prediction markets using Bitcoin today. Previously Stefan worked at tech companies in Silicon Valley and at Berlin-based startups. After finishing his Master’s in CS he decided to travel Asia for a year in 2014 and started Gnosis afterwards working from Berlin.

Here’s what Stefan had to say:

Question 1: What do you think the future of Prediction Markets looks like?

Stefan: ‘ Currently PM use cases are very limited. They are mostly used for sports betting and political betting and restricted to few jurisdictions. In the future PM can be applied to many more use cases to aggregate meaningful information and signal intends. We are currently looking into new applications, which would allow you to predict the relationship between markets. One example could be two prediction markets one on the Tesla stock price and the other on Elon Musk will step down as CEO. We could now evaluate how the tesla stock is predicted under the condition that Elon musk steps down. This way markets can show very fine-grained information.’

Question 2: If or when mass-adopted, what do you think will be their main use-case?

Stefan: ‘Signaling and optimization of complex systems like weather forecasts can become big use cases. Also, many financial products like futures/options can be built with prediction markets.’

Question 3: What are the current challenges that need to be solved?

Stefan: ‘The biggest non-technical challenge is still regulation. Prediction markets are either not regulated at all or very restricted. The biggest technical challenge for blockchain is still scalability and fair market mechanisms. This is why Gnosis is working a lot towards fair market mechanisms like the dutch exchange, which work in a decentralized environment.’