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Augur is getting a DAO. OracleDAO is a fork of MolochDAO, an Ethereum community funding initiative, and focuses on improving the decentralized prediction market.

Augur’s Decentralized Autonomous Organization

Launched last year, MolochDAO has focused on funding the development of Ethereum 2.0. The grant-making decentralized autonomous organization aimed to coordinate efforts to fund the public infrastructure surrounding Ethereum.

The community forked MolochDAO at the end of last month to create the new OracleDAO, according to Augur.

Someone forked @MolochDAO and made OracleDAO! "OracleDAO is a smart contract aimed and coordinating efforts to build tools and market Augur…this DAO will propose funding of marketing, research, and engineering related to the Augur project."https://t.co/19jbmtyYZo — Augur (@AugurProject) March 4, 2020

OracleDAO’s manifesto explained that its aim was to coordinate efforts to build tools and market Augur and its native token, REP. The people behind the initiative said that they expect Augur-related marketing, research, and engineering funding proposals on the platform.

By forking Moloch, the organization hopes to gain more freedom from the Forecast Foundation, a non-profit tasked with overseeing Augur development. While the manifesto noted that its development was “active and strong,” improvements to other tools could also be made.

“Other’s have begun to build tools and market Augur, but those attempts are highly centralized and at any point could be removed, significantly reducing the quality of life of Augur’s users and REP holders,” said OracleDAO’s manifesto.

Giving Control Back to the Community

OracleDAO was created to enable immediate changes in the current process of centralized development, said its founders. It could help scale engineering by hiring external consultants to improve Augur. Or, it could fund the development of other open-source tools that connect to the prediction platform.

Some examples of projects that could be deliberated on include creating better Augur market scanner tools, adding more foreign language support, and directly paying influencers to promote REP.

Despite its ambitious plans, OracleDAO was not created to diminish the work done either by Moloch nor by the Forecast Foundation. It could, in theory, function as an external aid to the Foundation and be responsible for handling non-engineering tasks.

This way, a significant burden from the Foundation would be lifted and it could be free to focus on the user experience and smart contract development on Augur.

Apart from keeping the interests of the Forecast Foundation in mind, OracleDAO will continue to follow the traditions set by Moloch.

OracleDAO members will also be expected to pay contributions to the organization in the DAI stablecoin, mirroring Moloch. Also following the tradition of MolochDAO will be the member onboarding process—in order to join, users must get approval from other DAO members. Users will also be able to withdraw their shares at any time and could be sacked from the organization by vote from other members.

More broadly, DAOs have been emerging faster than ever.

Last month Synthetix launched GrantsDAO to fund community projects. In January, Tezos capital launched StakerDAO to decide on which blockchains to stake for. Parity announced in December 2019 that they would no longer be accepting grants from the Ethereum Foundation and would instead be maintained by a DAO.

The DeFi movement seems to be pushing DAOs farther, and the community seems to have moved on from the famous Ethereum DAO hack.

Freed from the inflexible roadmap set by the Forecast Foundation, users of OracleDAO will, in theory, have more freedom and control over the development of the world’s fastest-growing decentralized prediction marketplace.