DeFi Prediction Markets For Crypto Traders
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PROJECT: PlotX
TICKER: PLOT
FOUNDED: February 2020, Singapore
WEB PAGE: plotx.io
WHITEPAPER: Whitepaper is written on 20 pages. The solution is presented in a simple and easy to understand form. At the end of the document, you can find a comparison table for a better overview of the prediction market solutions from the PlotX team perspective.
FIELD OF INTEREST: Decentralised prediction market
SHORT DESCRIPTION: PlotX is a non-custodial prediction protocol that enables users to earn unlimited rewards on high-yield prediction markets
GOAL: PlotX team wants to build a DeFi prediction protocol powered by the crypto community.
CHAIN /TOKEN TYPE: Ethereum / ERC-20
LIVE MAINNET & SCALABILITY [TPS]: public alpha testnet on Ethereum’s Kovan testnet since August 2020 (option to predict on one pair — BTC-USDT). Matic will help PlotX with L2 scalability.
DEV ACTIVITY (Github): Much development activity since March 2020 with 9 developers contributing to the code. PlotX has chosen ZK Labs as its lead security auditor ahead of the mainnet launch. ZK Labs will be verifying the security of the PlotX smart contracts.
PRODUCTS: Public Alpha (Beta planned until the end of 2020).
PlotX will have an easy and simple to use platform with user-friendly UI. After connecting your Ethereum wallet (Metamask for example) you will be able to start using the platform…create markets, participate and stake PLOT tokens etc
You can check the guide here.
EXISTING CUSTOMERS AND USERS: The platform is not yet live but the main audience is general crypto community. It is a predictions game for crypto pairs with leverage and options. This is interesting for all crypto savvy people as well as crypto traders.
COMPETITORS: Augur, Gnosis, Stox, Delphy, BlitzPredict and HiveMind platforms all work on the principle of the Wisdom of Crowds. Subjective resolution.
Guesser is another prediction market platform which was built on top of Augur protocol. Another competitor Veil recently shut down.
Some basic info about the Augur and Gnosis prediction protocols that was posted in the Cryp2Gem Community chat.
Omen, a platform by DXdao build on top of Gnosis, is the most similar solution to PlotX. Markets on omen.eth.link also use an automated market maker (AMM) to match trades and allow users to easily contribute to Uniswap-like liquidity pools. This allows markets to always reflect the latest expert opinion on their topic. Omen prediction market using the Gnosis conditional token framework. Using Realit.io with Kleros as an arbitrator to resolve a market’s outcome.
OpenPredict is the first DeFi protocol to turn live predictions into liquid assets. The protocol generates a tri-smart contract system for every event: one acts as an escrow for event predictors, second contract mints tokens that represent correct predictors, and third contract mint tokens that represent incorrect predictors.
Another interesting predictions project is Flux. On Flux, an ecosystem of stakeholders maintain the creation, resolution, disputation, and conclusion of data-based marketplaces connected to events and people in the real world.
More about Flux can be found in the Cryp2Gem Telegram chat.
Other competitors mentioned by the PlotX involve Synthetix and HXRO.
What Vitalik Buteric twitted: »Honestly prediction markets may be one of the most underrated categories of ethereum dapps right now. Omen and Augur v2 are both running and have active markets with pretty decent liquidity; go ahead and try them!«
»Augur’s design originally was AMM-based (after all, one of the Reddit posts that led to AMMs was called “let’s do decentralized exchanges the way we do prediction markets”); they switched to order book later (Crying face).« posted Vitalik in another twitt.
TEAM:
The team is introduced in this 10 min video.
Core founding members come from Nexus Mutual and GovBlocks.
*Ish Goel was a CTO since the beginnings. He also founded GovBlocks and is active CEO in a DeFi and a smart contract auditing company Somish Blockchain Labs where he works since 2009.
*Nitika Goel (previous Aurora) serves as the Lead Programmer at Nexus Mutual and co-founded GovBlocks in 2017. She also works as a CTO in Somish Blockchain Labs since 2014 where she has been the lead technical architect for various long term projects in the Government, Retail, Manufacturing and BFSI sector. Nikita and Ish shared their path since 2014. *Kartic Rakhra is a Head of Marketing in Somish Blockchain Labs and has an active position in GovBlocks as a Community Lead both since 2017. Before that he worked in several Indian startups, mostly in marketing.
*Satheesh Alex has 14 years experience in Complex IT delivery, Digital Engagements, Project Management, Program Management and 10 years of exposure with Insurance Solution in Life and P&C. His last position was in Cognizant where he worked for almost 9 years as a Senior Manager.
The team has wast experience but also many open positions. Some even three active roles. Ish, Nitika and Kartic are working together for several years so they know exactly what they can build together.
PARTNERS:
PlotX partnered with MATIC to explore L2 scalability, ZK-Labs for Smart Contract Security Audits and Deep Work Studio for UX improvements. They say there are many others in the pipeline.
Strategic partners and advisors include NGC Ventures, 3commas and Brilliance Ventures.
Venrai team is helping out with the compliance side of the project.
PlotX also uses on-chain governance powered by GovBlocks.
INVESTORS: not yet known
TOKEN USE CASE AND REVENUES:
The growth of the ecosystem will lead to more revenues. The focus has to be on ecosystem growth. More adoption. More alignment of interests. Pragmatic decentralisation.
The PLOT token has 6 use-cases as described below:
1. Peer to peer commissions.
2. Referral Mining: Building in virality by design
3. Community Mining: Wide distribution in communities
4. Play Mining: Stake & Play
5. Governance Mining
6. Liquidity Mining: Yield Farming
Each of these token use cases is explained in the PlotX Wiki token model section.
TOKEN METRICS:
FULLY DILUTED MARKET CAP: $10 million
INITIAL MARKET CAP: $600k
TOTAL TOKEN SUPPLY: 200 million PLOT
INITIAL CIRCULATING SUPPLY [%]: 6% (12 millionPLOT)
FUNDS RAISING INFO (allocations & vesting):
*Seed — $0,015; locked since Feb 2020, No upfront release, 5% monthly release after 3 months
*Early Supporter — $0,03; 10% upfront release, then 15% release every month
*Private — $0,05; 20% upfront release, then 13.33% release every month
*Public — $0,05; 50% upfront release and 50% in the following month
Public Community Offering will be done in two rounds:
*Round 1: PlotX Community Offering priced at $0.05/token will be conducted for active PlotX participants and alpha/beta testers with allocation $125k for 250 participants
* Round 2: Strong Holder Offering also priced at $0.05/token for the Open Predict Community with allocation $75k for 150 participants
TOKEN DISTRIBUTION:
9,5% Seed
7,5% Early Supporters
20,0% Private Sale
2,5% Community Offering
22,5% Ecosystem
15,0% Team
3,0% Advisors
20,0% Reserves
PlotX is very transparent about their token metrics. All the info can be found here.
Seed investors won’t have to wait long to get their first tokens. The seed offering was done in February 2020 and they get 5% tokens unlocked 3 months after TGE. Seed have x4 token price advantage compared to private and public investors. They have quite scattered distribution but also quite a big allocation with 9,5% or 19M PLOT tokens. Their monthly 5% unlock represents 950k tokens or $47,5k considering the public and private sale price. That shouldn’t have too much impact on the token price even if all those tokens would be sold immediately.
Early supporters have an x1,6 token price advantage compared to later investors. They have 10% tokens unlocked which represents 1,5M PLOT tokens or $75k.
Private investors get 20% tokens upfront, which is 4M PLOT tokens or $400k. Compared to public community offering with 2,5M tokens unlocked ($125k).
Private investors would need an x5 token price compared to the initial investment price. That would make a $0,25 PLOT price and a market cap of $3M. Not that impossible if market conditions are favourable.
All in all token metrics seem quite fair with a slight advantage to seed investors. But they are early investors taking the biggest risk. Most importantly, the team is very transparent regarding tokenomics.
ROADMAP: There is much planned in the following months to be excited. Bata mainnet, token generation event (TGE) and token distribution (details are yet to be announced). Also planned for 2020 are integrations with ChainLink, L2 scalability solution like Matic or Fuse and AMM model. More details about the roadmap and the milestones can be found on their website.
SOCIAL MEDIA:
Telegram 3500 members
Twitter 4300 followers
Discord 1750 members
Their social media channels are quite big and active which should raise the awareness prior to the Public Community Token Offering and further adoption of the platform.
NOTES/SPECIALS
PlotX is the most recent decentralised prediction market platform with a focus on DeFi. It is an open-sourced, non-custodial prediction protocol that allows permissionless betting participation and fair market creation, settlement and incentivisation. PlotX will skip the politics and sports predictions and rather focus on cryptocurrencies price predictions. All the actions will be done on-chain: market creation via smart contracts rather than people, price determination and instant purchase rather than the creation of low liquidity order books and market settlement with a Participation Mining.
PlotX has a different approach to predictions resolutions than other existing blockchain prediction platforms which are mostly based on subjective voting cast by the crowd. PlotX uses Chainlink and Provable oracles for price discovery of assets and settlement. If for some reason, oracle doesn’t work, then the market enters dispute resolution.
In other prediction protocols, users need to create a market manually around a question. PlotX automates the process of market creation and provides the mathematically based resolution. No subjective answers. Those contribute to wider decentralisation but can also lead to false or manipulated resolutions. To eliminate the centralisation, the price feeds of PlotX markets come from decentralised oracles which aggregate data from several exchanges which are put on-chain from validators. Market creation is a smart contract-driven and has an Automated Market Making (AMM). That means that each prediction market has its own liquidity pool. Similar to Uniswap protocol/exchange. There is also a quick turnaround with hourly, daily and weekly markets so you don’t need to lock your funds for an unknown period of time.
Essential to PlotX protocol is leveraged predictions. That means that the user can lower risk exposure due to multiple options and leverages. Risk management options for any participant.
All settlement is oraclised and done on-chain automatically via smart contracts. All transactions are processed on-chain for complete transparency. Participation is rewarded. Rewards can be claimed and distributed instantly.
Ish Goel, Founding Member: “One of the most important ethe behind which we rally is — Providing upfront value to the community by launching a live product with:
1. Visible on-chain lockups of founder tokens and also investor tokens.
2. On-chain governance
3. A non-anonymous team that has built projects like Nexus Mutual & GovBlocks.
We feel we have this opportunity to create something which has never existed in the past. Imagine the “wisdom of the crowd” that we will be able to attract if we all work on PlotX together!
In the words of Abraham Lincoln “The best way to predict the future is to to create it”.
While Gnosis and Augur exist for quite some time and have the biggest share, for now, projects like Omen, Flux, OpenPredict and PlotX represent a new wave of upcoming disruptors in the prediction market solutions. AMM and oracle based betting resolutions seem like a very cool combo. Vitalik Buterin stated that prediction markets are very underrated at this point. He also favours the use of AMMs. Partnership with Matic will help with scaling and might give PlotX another boost in a race with competitors building on Ethereum blockchain. Scalability is the biggest advantage of Flux. All in all, the future is looking great for PlotX.
Cryp2Gem team is always available for any further discussions in our social media. Looking forward to all the feedback.
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