# About Augur

Augur is a decentralized oracle. It tells apps on the blockchain what happened in the real world.

It launched on Ethereum in 2018 as a prediction market. Since 2025 the Lituus Foundation has led its restart, and the work now centers on Augur Lituus, one of the next versions of Augur's oracle.

## Our position

No company or committee should hold the final word on what happened.

Augur was built on that position from the start, and Augur Lituus is too.

> Knowledge of the world is spread across many people, and no central authority can gather all of it without bias. So Augur's answers come from the people who know, with something to lose if they are wrong.
>
> [Augur Lituus whitepaper, §1 ↗](https://github.com/AugurProject/whitepaper/blob/master/Lituus/English/Augur_Lituus_Whitepaper.pdf)

## The story so far

Over a decade on Ethereum, from a prediction market to an oracle for any app.

- **2015, The crowdsale.** Augur holds one of Ethereum's first crowdsales to fund a decentralized prediction market. [Augur blog, July 2026](/blog/augur-testing-past-building-future/)
- **2018, Live on Ethereum.** Augur launches on mainnet. REP holders settle disputed outcomes, and a fork is the last resort. [Augur blog, July 2026](/blog/augur-testing-past-building-future/)
- **March 2025, The restart.** Long-time Augur community members restart the project in public as the Lituus Foundation, stewards of Augur's treasury. [Reboot roadmap, April 2025](/blog/augur-reboot-2025/)
- **May 2025, Generalized Augur.** A draft proposal, shared for comment, for a universal and permissionless oracle that any application can ask. [Generalized Augur, May 2025](/blog/generalized-augur/)
- **January 2026, The whitepaper.** The Augur Lituus whitepaper sets out how the oracle works, with a comparative analysis of oracle security. [Augur Lituus whitepaper ↗](https://github.com/AugurProject/whitepaper/blob/master/Lituus/English/Augur_Lituus_Whitepaper.pdf)
- **August 2026, The Moon Fork.** A dispute over whether NASA's Artemis II lifted off escalated all the way to a fork: the first full run of Augur v2's fork on Ethereum mainnet. When migration closed on 3 August, Yes had won. 99.97% of migrated REP moved to Yes, the answer that matched what happened. [Moon Fork report](/blog/post-fork-announcements/)
- **Now, Building Augur Lituus.** The core question flow is in place, and the work now focuses on disputes and forking. [Q2 2026 report](/blog/q2-2026-progress-report/)

See [what comes next](/index.md#roadmap).

## Who does what

The Lituus Foundation funds independent teams to build Augur. Neither the Foundation nor the teams decide what the oracle answers.

- **Funds and coordinates: Lituus Foundation.** Took on stewardship of Augur and its treasury in 2025. It funds more than one team working on the problem and reviews the Augur Lituus code against the whitepaper. [lituus.foundation ↗](https://lituus.foundation/)
- **Engineers Augur Lituus: ChainSafe.** Builds the Augur Lituus implementation in a public repository, and completed its first milestones in July 2026. [chainsafe.io ↗](https://chainsafe.io/)
- **Builds Augur Statoblast: Dark Florist.** An independent team funded by the Foundation. It builds Augur Statoblast, a prediction market on Zoltar, and pursues its own oracle research. [GitHub ↗](https://github.com/darkflorist)
- **Decides the answers: anyone with REP at stake.** Anyone can report what happened or challenge a report by putting REP behind it, and a fork is the last resort. No one holds a backstop or veto over Augur Lituus answers, the Foundation included. [See how it works](/index.md#how-it-works)

## How the work is done

The work happens in public, so anyone can check it.

- **Open source.** Augur Lituus and Zoltar are developed in public repositories, where anyone can follow or audit the work. [Augur Lituus code ↗](https://github.com/AugurProject/Lituus-CS) · [Zoltar code ↗](https://github.com/AugurProject/zoltar)
- **Research first.** Each design is published for review before it is built. The whitepaper came out six months before the first implementation milestones. [Read the whitepaper ↗](https://github.com/AugurProject/whitepaper/blob/master/Lituus/English/Augur_Lituus_Whitepaper.pdf)
- **Clear about status.** Quarterly reports say what is done and what is still open, including the parts still being worked out. [Q2 2026 report](/blog/q2-2026-progress-report/)