Bet on the 2020 US presidential election in Dai

2020 US presidential election markets are now on Veil, denominated in Dai.

Two of the most common requests we get are support for Dai and markets on the 2020 US presidential election. Today we’re very excited to launch both. You can now bet on who will win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination with Dai, Maker’s decentralized stable currency.

🇺🇸 Start trading now: https://veil.co/2020.

There are many venues for betting on politics, so why should you choose Veil? Here’s the short answer: Veil lets you bet as much as you want without paying high fees or giving up control of your money.

Some prediction markets impose per-market trading limits. Bet as much as you want in crypto on Veil.

Betting sites routinely charge 5% or more on settlement. Veil charges 1%.

Exchanges ask you to send them your money to bet. Veil is non-custodial, meaning you control your money at all times.

These are some of the first 2020 US presidential election prediction markets on Ethereum. We want to use them to demonstrate that you can offer a world-class trading experience without charging high fees or holding users’ money.

How to trade

We’re starting with markets on which candidate will win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Before trading, you’ll need to do two things:

Get Dai. If you don’t already have Dai, there are a bunch of ways to get it. We’ve integrated Uniswap into the Veil wallet, so you can swap ETH for Dai from within Veil. Dai is also available on Radar Relay or you can open a CDP with Maker. Unlock your Dai. From your Veil wallet, click the “Unlock Dai” button to approve Dai for trading on Veil. This step is needed so 0x, the protocol Veil uses for decentralized exchange, can use your Dai to execute any trades you make.

That’s it! Now head over to Veil to make your first bets. You can always use Veil’s Pro interface if you’re feeling advanced. Or keep reading if you want to know how all this works…

Under the hood

Veil has used the Augur protocol for defining markets and holding funds and depended on Augur’s decentralized oracle for resolving markets. Augur uses Ether as collateral but plans to support Dai in an upgrade coming later this year. You can read about Augur v2 in this blog post.

While Veil intends to support Augur v2, its impending release has prevented users from creating long-running markets on the current version of Augur. Therefore Veil has deployed a new version of Augur that lets us create markets in arbitary denomination tokens (Dai, in this case) and resolve them using Augur v2 when it is released. We’re calling it AugurLite. And all of our 2020 US presidential election markets now use AugurLite.

About AugurLite

AugurLite includes three main features:

Dai is used as collateral instead of Ether. Users no longer have to worry about exposure to Ether, especially in long-running markets. Dai is a decentralized stable currency pegged to the US Dollar. AugurLite actually supports the creation of markets with arbitrary denomination tokens, so we can easily support other stable currencies in the future. Off-chain trading. Augur’s on-chain order books and trading engine have been removed. All trading should happen via decentralized exchange protocols like 0x and enabled by off-chain relayers like Veil, BlitzPredict, and Flux. AugurLite simply acts as an escrow layer, converting money into transferrable share tokens and back. Oracle agnostic. Markets on AugurLite aren’t automatically resolved by Augur’s oracle. AugurLite markets can interface with Augur, Chainlink, or something else entirely. Augur’s decentralized oracle is a critical piece of infrastructure because it brings real-world information onto Ethereum. But not every market needs to use it, so market creators can decide how their markets should be resolved. Therefore, there’s no AugurLite token, and it’s free to create markets using the AugurLite protocol.

We’ve open-sourced all the AugurLite code, and we’ve published technical documentation on Github. We’ve also extensively tested AugurLite internally and undergone a third-party security audit of the protocol. In the coming weeks we plan to publish more documentation for interacting with and building on AugurLite. In the meantime, please reach out to the Veil team on Twitter, email, or Discord with any questions or comments.