Long before Polymarket existed, there was Augur. Launched on Ethereum in 2018, Augur was the first major decentralized prediction market protocol. Co-founded by Joey Krug and Jeremy Gardner, Augur raised $5.1 million in one of Ethereum’s earliest token sales (the REP token) and launched with massive expectations. It was supposed to be the future of forecasting.
Augur was technically impressive but practically unusable. The interface was complex. Resolution was slow and required REP token holders to vote on outcomes. Trading fees were high because of Ethereum gas prices. Most importantly, the user experience was terrible — placing a bet involved multiple transactions, long wait times, and constant interaction with smart contracts. Even crypto natives found it frustrating.
The platform also faced an early controversy when assassination markets — bets on whether specific public figures would die — appeared shortly after launch. The team had built a fully decentralized market, which meant they couldn’t censor markets they found objectionable. The press coverage was harsh. Augur became associated with the dark side of unregulated markets, and the team scrambled to add filters in v2 of the protocol.
Despite Augur’s failures, its lessons shaped everything that came after. Polymarket was essentially Augur with better UX and a different settlement layer. The technical architecture, the optimistic oracle pattern, the bonding mechanisms — all of it traced back to ideas Augur had pioneered. By 2024, Augur was largely forgotten, but its DNA lived on in every successful prediction market platform. Sometimes the pioneers don’t survive. Their ideas do.
Leave a Reply