We’re thrilled to announce Augur Turbo—the world’s only fast-resolving, easy-to-use, decentralized betting platform with daily markets for sports, crypto, politics, and current events. Betting and trading cost hundredths of a penny most days while creating a market could be a few cents. Augur Turbo is now live at Augur.net.

Augur Turbo is an extension of the Augur protocol, which is a human-based decentralized oracle that incentivizes truth-seeking for predictions. Augur v2 will continue to live on layer 1 as Augur Pro.

To bring secure, cost-efficient data feeds and settlement to Augur’s global sports betting markets, we’re officially integrating Chainlink’s widely adopted oracle network into the Augur Turbo platform, now live on Polygon’s layer 2 scaling solution. With Chainlink integrated, anyone in the world will be able to create their own betting markets on Augur Turbo for a wide range of different sports events in the NBA, MLB, MMA, and Olympics, with additional support for NFL, college football, soccer, tennis, golf, and e-sports following soon. Chainlink’s highly secure and reliable oracle networks will then be used to deliver schedules and post-game scores, team, and player stats on-chain, ensuring each sports betting market on Augur Turbo is settled in an accurate, transparent, and timely manner.

The combination of Augur, Chainlink, and Polygon offers full stack infrastructure for supporting secure, low-cost betting markets that settle in near real-time and according to an aggregation of premium data sources. As  the Augur ecosystem grows, we can easily launch new Chainlink Data Feeds so market creators can quickly bootstrap new betting markets for more sporting events and other verticals.

Augur Turbo: A Global, No-Limit Betting Platform

Traditional betting exchanges are highly centralized and introduce a large number of restrictions on users, such as limiting payouts and withdrawals, siphoning fees of 5-10%, and limiting the types of markets that can be created. In comparison, Augur Turbo is a set of  open-source smart contracts that give users the ability to create their own on-chain betting markets, leveraging the advantages of blockchain technology to provide fair odds, low fees, permissionless access, and guaranteed payouts upon settlement to a global audience.

To settle user-created betting markets, Augur Turbo’s smart contracts require reliable data  about the outcomes of particular real-world events (e.g., what team won the world series). However, such information is not natively generated by blockchains, thus requiring an external entity known as an “oracle” to fetch that data from the real-world and relay it on-chain. While Augur Turbo has a built-in human-based oracle mechanism that uses a token-weighted voting mechanism with escalating dispute rounds, the process could be quicker using Chainlink-powered decentralized oracle networks. Augur Turbo’s prediction markets relying on Chainlink can settle immediately after a market closes.

With the launch of Augur Turbo on Polygon’s highly scalable and fee-efficient layer-2 network, the importance of swift market settlement becomes increasingly important as it  increases both capital efficiency and betting market liquidity. Additionally, a sufficiently robust oracle network taking in data from many premium data providers provides strong guarantees around the quality of data used to determine the outcome of events like sports on Augur Turbo.

Augur Turbo is the only betting platform in the world that meets all bettor needs, which include:

• No restrictions or suspensions — Augur Turbo is a set of audited and secure smart contracts. There are no humans in the middle to freeze funds or suspend accounts.
• Low fees — Trading fees on Polygon are a few pennies at the most. Augur Turbo is developed by a non-profit, which does not take any fees. At times, market creators or liquidity providers may set fees for certain markets.
• No limit betting — Augur Turbo smart contracts accept bets of any amount without limit.
• Daily markets and fast resolution across verticals — Integration with Chainlink provides support for daily markets for sports, crypto, politics, and current events.
• Decentralized and global — Augur Turbo smart contracts can be accessed by anyone from anywhere at any time.

Why Chainlink Oracles

Chainlink provides an optimal mix of time-tested infrastructure that’s already securing tens of billions of dollars across leading DeFi protocols, as well as extreme flexibility to access data from any off-chain API needed to settle betting markets on Augur Turbo. Some of the primary reasons to integrate with Chainlink include:

• High-Quality Data — Chainlink oracles manage API keys and account logins, allowing them to aggregate and deliver market resolution data from highly available and financially incentivized APIs.
• Reliable Nodes — Chainlink Data Feeds are secured by a large collection of independent, security-reviewed, and Sybil-resistant oracle nodes run by leading enterprises, data providers, and DevOps teams with a strong on-chain history of performance, even during extreme network congestion.
• Decentralized Infrastructure — Chainlink Data Feeds are decentralized at the data source, oracle node, and network levels, eliminating any central point of failure in the sourcing and delivery of external data to Augur Turbo betting markets.
• Transparent Performance — Chainlink Data Feeds can be monitored by anyone in real-time using existing data analytics tools such as market.link and reputation.link, empowering users to verify the data and oracle network triggering their contract.

Because of these benefits, Augur Turbo is designed to use Chainlink to settle sports betting markets, the most popular category of betting markets. Settlement parameters can include the winner of a specific game or season, the number of points earned by a particular team or player, or any other sports-related information. By operating directly on Polygon, Augur Turbo betting markets will be frictionless and cheap to interact with. In the future, we can use Chainlink’s blockchain-agnostic capabilities to further expand into additional blockchains and layer-2 environments as needed.

About Augur

Augur is the world's most accessible, low-fee, no-limit betting platform. It allows you to buy and sell real-money stakes in world outcomes including sports, crypto, politics, and current events.

Augur is a set of audited and secure smart contracts. To learn more, visit Augur.net, subscribe to the Augur newsletter, and follow @augurproject on Twitter.

Discord | Reddit | GitHub | Help Docs | Docs

About Chainlink

Chainlink is the most widely used and secure way to power universally connected smart contracts. With Chainlink, developers can connect any blockchain with high-quality data sources from other blockchains as well as real-world data. Managed by a global, decentralized community of hundreds of thousands of people, Chainlink is introducing a fairer model for contracts. Its network currently secures billions of dollars in value for smart contracts across the decentralized finance (DeFi), insurance and gaming ecosystems, among others.

Chainlink is trusted by hundreds of organizations to deliver definitive truth via secure, reliable data feeds. To learn more, visit chain.link, subscribe to the Chainlink newsletter, and follow @chainlink on Twitter.

Docs | Discord | Reddit | YouTube | Telegram | Events | GitHub | Price Feeds | DeFi | VRF