Augur is a decentralized oracle and peer to peer protocol for prediction markets. Augur is free, public, open source software, portions of which are licensed under the General Public License (GPL) and portions of which are licensed under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) license. Augur is a set of smart contracts written in Solidity that can be deployed to the Ethereum blockchain.
Augur is a protocol, freely available for anyone to use however they please. Augur is accessible through a desktop client app, similar to interacting with an Ethereum or Bitcoin node. Users of the Augur protocol must themselves ensure that the actions they are performing are compliant with the laws in all applicable jurisdictions and must acknowledge that others’ use of the Augur protocol may not be compliant. Users of the Augur protocol do so at their own risk.
The Forecast Foundation is a group of developers and technology professionals who are passionate about the potential of decentralized applications. The Forecast Foundation is a not-for-profit entity, it does not own or lead Augur, but rather supports and develops the free, open-source protocol that is Augur.
The Forecast Foundation’s mission is to support the development of open-source trading protocols, oracle systems and related technologies that advance transparent, open and financially sound markets, as well as their underlying protocols and toolings.
The Forecast Foundation has no role in the operation of markets created on Augur, and does not have the ability to spend funds that are held in escrow on-contract, does not control how markets resolve or are created, does not approve or reject trades or other transactions on the network, and do not have the ability to modify, cancel, undo, or interact with orders on the network. The Forecast Foundation has no power to censor, restrict, or curate markets, orders, trades, positions or resolutions on the Augur protocol contracts. The Forecast Foundation has no more control over the Augur protocol than anyone else using Ethereum.
The Forecast Foundation is not a bank or financial institution and does not provide investment or financial advice or consulting services to users.
Augur is a set of smart contracts that can be deployed to the Ethereum blockchain. Any user who downloads and runs the Augur software has access to the Augur protocol on the Ethereum blockchain. There is currently no platform or deployment of Augur built or catered for specific users, locales or countries, and the Forecast Foundation does not host any deployment of Augur or the client used to interface with the Augur protocol. The Forecast Foundation has no control over what people choose to do with the Augur protocol.
The Forecast Foundation does not and will never host or operate any platform or version of Augur. The Forecast Foundation cannot monitor, control or restrict access to such software from certain users. The Forecast Foundation does encourage users to follow their respective local jurisdictional laws, rules and regulations, even though it can’t and doesn’t control their use of the Augur protocol. In short, anyone who can access the Ethereum blockchain can access Augur, because Augur is a set of smart contracts that exist on the Ethereum blockchain.
Reputation (REP) is a cryptocurrency, used by reporters during market dispute phases of Augur. REP holders must perform work, in the form of staking their REP on correct outcomes, to receive a portion of the markets settlement fees. If you do not report correctly, you do not get the fees. If you report incorrectly, you lose your REP. If you don’t participate in a fork (when the network has a very large dispute over an outcome), you lose 5% of your REP. Passive holders of Reputation (REP) that are not using their Reputation (REP) within the Augur protocol to stake on disputes and forks are penalized. The treatment of REP within the Augur protocol is governed not by the Forecast Foundation but by the protocols smart contracts as described in the Augur white paper and documentation.
The Forecast Foundation does not offer any products or services. The Forecast Foundation develops free open source software, the Augur protocol. Augur is free software, which acts as a decentralized oracle and peer to peer prediction market protocol.
Augur is not a prediction market, it is a protocol for cryptocurrency users to create their own prediction markets. Augur is a set of open source smart contracts that can be deployed to the Ethereum blockchain. The Augur protocol is nothing more than open source software, and individual users of the Augur protocol are the ones that create prediction markets using the Augur protocol. The Forecast Foundation has zero involvement in the creation of individual prediction markets on the Augur protocol, and the Forecast Foundation is not "Augur".
Markets on Augur are created by individual users of the Augur protocol. The Forecast Foundation does not operate or control, nor can it control, what markets and actions people perform and create on the Augur protocol. People who do create markets using the Augur protocol must ensure they’re in compliance with all their local jurisdictional laws, rules and regulations. Markets on the Augur protocol are settled in Ether [ETH].
The Forecast Foundation writes and publishes open source software on Github. There is a test website for developers at dev.augur.net running on the test network of Ethereum (play money), however the Forecast Foundation does not run or operate any website hosting a deployment of the Augur protocol on the main network of Ethereum (real money). The Augur protocol is a set of Solidity smart contracts that exist on the Ethereum blockchain.
Among other things, the Forecast Foundation does not:
Users who decide to run the Augur code are the ones who perform trades and create markets on the Augur protocol. All functions of routing orders, matching orders, processing trades, escrow funds, manage the order book and resolve and settle markets are all operated and run on the Ethereum blockchain itself through a set of smart contracts, the Augur core protocol. Miners running Ethereum nodes route, match, store and process orders, trades and markets on the Augur protocol. All funds are escrowed and transferred directly on the Ethereum blockchain itself.
The Augur protocol is the only prediction market protocol that the Forecast Foundation is aware of where the development team doesn’t do anything beyond writing the free open source code. The Forecast Foundation and the people who’ve written the Augur protocol code don’t create markets on the Augur protocol itself, they do not perform trades, or have the ability to monitor, control, censor, or modify any actions performed on the Augur protocol. Instead, the Forecast Foundation encourages users to perform these actions from jurisdictions where they have proper licensing and guidance, and where they can follow the appropriate regulations governing the actions they perform on the Augur protocol.
