Members of the Augur community are shaking their heads after noticing an incredibly strange prediction market on the platform. The market reads as follows:
“Will the weather [be] good when the “Will the weather be good for the Bastille day military parade in Paris tomorrow.?” market resolve[s].”
The market has been branded a “meta-market” and it seems to be entirely redundant: if the weather is good during the parade, the weather will also be good when the market resolves. If the weather is bad, it will be bad. In this case, any bettor should simply bet on the original market.
That, however, assumes that markets are resolved instantly. The actual timeline is more complicated: the original market ended in July (which is when Bastille Day takes place), but has been stuck in a “crowdsourcing dispute” for months. This means that the new meta-market concerns weather on a different, and unknown, day.
Dubious Legitimacy
The meta-market has been declared invalid, which means that the creator will lose the money they deposited in order to create it. However, the market’s author has created other normal markets that concern NFL playoffs. As such, the author may not have been trolling Augur users, despite the odd nature of the meta-market.
So it is possible that the market was entirely legitimate. Nevertheless, there is no actual way to implement a meta-market through Augur’s interface. According to a Redditor who goes by veoxxoev, Augur’s UI cannot call finalization dates. “Until the feature… is implemented, such markets make little sense,” he claims.
Alternatively, the market may simply have been an experiment to test the limits of Augur, as another Redditor notes:
“It is kind of fascinating to watch the system work out the ridiculous [minutiae] of these markets though – good test for controversial outcomes with unimportant markets.”
Not the First Strange Market
Commentators have noticed bizarre markets on Augur in the past. Additionally, the platform has come under fire for temporarily hosting assassination markets. On top of those problems, the platform seems to be losing users over time.
But despite the occasional oddity, Augur continues to serve as a platform for dedicated bettors. This week, the platform had an average daily trading volume of 71.7 ETH (about $16,000). Over one million dollars are currently at stake across nearly 100 liquid markets.
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