Augur is a Decentralized Prediction Market Platform that utilizes Blockchain technology to solve many of the problems that have plagued past prediction markets. Augur’s groundbreaking decentralized oracle solution enables anyone around the world to create a market that has automated payouts, eliminates counterparty risk and uses no centralized servers to host the platform. The Augur Beta is live at Augur.net.

In the summer of 2015, Augur raised $5.2 Million Dollars in our Reputation Token Crowdsale, making the project one of the 20 most successful crowdfunding campaigns in history (according to Wikipedia’s list).

Prediction markets allow users to buy and sell shares in the outcome of an event. The current market price of a share is an estimate of the probability of an event occurring. The accuracy of a large prediction market and the consensus of various individual models has been discussed by FiveThirtyEight.com’s Nate Silver:

“it would be useful to have a dozen FiveThirtyEight-like models in the public sphere. The consensus of models or forecasts is very often better than even the best-performing members of the group.”

In 2015, Augur had an incredibly successful year, including being selected to participate in CNBC and Singularity University’s Exponential Finance XCS Challenge. The conference’s influential judges were given the very first look at our Alpha software. Those on the judging panel represented Forbes, Barclays, Deloitte, Wells Fargo and Credit Suisse. This exclusive audience selected Augur as a Breakthrough Technology finalist! Augur was the only Blockchain related project to make it to the finals within the Breakthrough field; this field is reserved for what is deemed to be the most innovative projects and technologies in the world. One of the most exclusive audiences of any technology or FinTech conference was introduced to Augur and the momentum hasn’t stopped since.

Coinbase, a market-leader in the Bitcoin & Blockchain space included Augur as one of it’s “5 Most Exciting Bitcoin Projects of 2015” in their Q2 2015 Bitcoin Trend Report. Augur was placed in a very exclusive and high-profile group featuring industry heavyweights Abra, 21, and Blockstream.

Our “How Augur Works” animated explainer video has received over 200,000 views since it’s release in May, becoming the most viewed prediction market video in the history of YouTube within it’s first 2 months. Narration by Country Music singer Shooter Jennings and animations by animation powerhouse JBC Motion led to many viewers being exposed to prediction markets for the very first time.

Included in this packet are biographies of the Augur team and advisors, select coverage from press and media outlets, examples of the forecasting accuracy of prediction markets, quotes by influential individuals about Augur and prediction markets as well as some other additional resources. For any additional materials, press inquiries or other information please contact tony@augur.net.

Sincerely,Tony SakichDirector of Marketingtony@augur.net

Table Of ContentsPage 1: About the Augur TeamPage 2: Augur Advisory BoardPage 3: Augur Press & MediaPage 4: Prediction Market Accuracy ExamplesPage 5: Additional Augur ResourcesPage 6: Quotes On AugurPages 7-9: FAQPages 10+: Augur Reputation Crowdsale Information

Other Important InformationIn addition to the information presented in this press kit, there are many additional documents, blog posts and important technical information that we wanted to share. Most of this will not be relevant to most outlets but it’s important to us to be transparent in all instances:

About The Augur Team:Joey Krug – Co-Founder & Core DeveloperJoey took a leave of absence from Pomona College to focus full time on Augur. He conducted the first Bitcoin transaction via sound as well as the first Bitcoin transaction via iOS-Android Bluetooth LE. As a prelude to Augur, Joey and Jack completed Sidecoin, which allows new cryptocurrency distributions based on "snapshots" of Bitcoin account balances. He works on Augur’s backend codebase which interfaces with Chris's math functions. He is currently making Augur’s consensus implementation faster and more accurate. Joey worked on bitcoin merchant solutions and enjoys hardware tinkering and game development.

Dr. Jack Peterson, Ph.D. – Co-Founder & Core DeveloperJack is a physicist, entrepreneur, and software developer whose work spans startups, academia, and government. He worked with distributed networks and cryptocurrency while finishing his PhD at UCSF. He’s delved into scientific computing, blockchain coding (1, 2, 3), computer vision, neural networks, peer-to-peer networks, GIS, and fullstack web development. As a National Defense Science and Engineering graduate fellow, he published peer-reviewed articles on networks and information theory, including modeling and simulation involving protein-protein interaction networks, kinetic model extraction from single molecule experiments and "heavy-tailed" distributions observed in biology and society.

Tony Sakich – Director of MarketingTony managed the first, bitcoin-related national TV ad campaign, the most successful social media campaign in the cryptocurrency space to date, as the Marketing Manager for BitPay. That capped 10+ years of work on digital campaigns with Microsoft, PayPal, ESPN, Warner Bros. and other tech and entertainment groups. He is obsessed with decentralization and bayesian probability, making him a perfect fit for Augur. Tony's philosophy on marketing focuses on transparency, customer interaction and making the project as easy to understand as possible. To check out his other projects and more go to his website at TonySakich.com. He can also be found at Twitter @TonySwish and on LinkedIn here.

Ryan Garner – Back-End DeveloperRyan is a programmer skilled in Basic and C++. Before joining Augur he designed an improved quadratic fee structure, created a routine for automatically distributing the labor of judges to achieve a target accuracy, and designed a way to calculate re-adjudication bonds based on opportunity cost. In Ryan's spare time he enjoys researching and discussing futurology, decentralization, concepts derived from quantum nature, and use cases of DAOs. Ryan lightly uses social media but can still be found on Twitter, GitHub and is constantly on /r/Augur using the handle imkharn.

Tomas Priecinsky – Front-End DeveloperTomas joined Intrade back in 2011, where he gained experience on how to build various UIs - simplified for basic users, advanced for real-time traders and compact for mobile devices. Then he went to work for Barclays in 2013 before coming back to the development team that previously created Intrade. Tomas was a core developer of the Tradesports fantasy sports platform. He yet again worked on real-time UIs and building multi-platform hybrid mobile applications while gaining exposure to bitcoin. He's skilled at JS, CSS, Java, SQL and various JS frameworks. He spent a few years at The University of Economics, Prague (Vysoká škola ekonomická v Praze) before moving on early to a career in programming.

Peronet Despeignes – Director of SpecialOpsPerry worked as a data-driven economics correspondent for the Financial Times, Fortune Magazine and Investors Business Daily after majoring in economics at Harvard. Before the 2007 financial crash, he uncovered heavy insider selling by US homebuilder executives, used futures markets to gauge the surprising extent of Wall Street's dependence on the Federal Reserve and ran regressions to assess which nations might outperform or underperform going forward based on which were currently "underpriced" or "overpriced." He manages various research and multimedia projects for information services group Serenity.

Baz Karam – Front-End DeveloperBaz has been engineering web applications for over 17 years. He has built systems that generate $100M+ annually. Has worked on databases that crunch tens of billions of records. Developed 3D interactive web-based systems. Led the architecture and engineering at startups. Worked in finance, pharmaceuticals, telecom, consumer products, large enterprises, small businesses and socially responsible companies. He is a published JavaScript expert. Baz is currently working on the Augur UI.

Carl Wolfenden – Head of Product & DesignCarl has over a decade’s experience with online prediction markets. Most recently, he was Head of Product for Tradesports.com - managing the design and launch of their web and mobile products. Prior to that, he served as Head of Operations for Intrade during the 2008 and 2012 US Presidential elections - and many of the other global events that put Intrade on the map as the leading prediction market platform in the world. His role at Augur is to get the front-end of the platform designed, built and launched.

Augur Advisory BoardVitalik ButerinVitalik is best known as the founder of Ethereum, a decentralized Blockchain platform that can be summarized as a “decentralized mining network and software development platform rolled into one”. Augur will be the very first decentralized application (Dapp) to be released on Ethereum, followed by many others including IBM’s “Internet of Things” application.

Creator of Ethereum Winner of 2014 World Technology Award for IT Software & $100,000 Peter Thiel Fellowship Award

Dr. Robin HansonDr. Hanson is considered a pioneer and the most influential figure in the history of prediction markets. Hanson has been involved in a variety of prediction market projects from Xanadu, the first internal corporate prediction market to working with powerhouses like DARPA, Lockheed and NASA. His publications have become extraordinarily influential, including a heavy influence on the work of FiveThirtyEight.com’s Nate Silver as stated in his 2012 book “The Signal and the Noise”. Dr. Hanson has been one of our most active advisors, providing incredible knowledge, guidance and insight whenever he is asked. He even recorded a short video with Augur’s Tony Sakich that accompanied an analysis of some of his most notable work.

Chief Scientist, Consensus Point Economist, George Mason University

Research Associate, Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University

Founder, OvercomingBias.com

Ron BernsteinRon Bernstein is best known as the Founder & CEO of InTrade.com, widely regarded as one of the most commercially successful prediction markets in history. His is currently the CEO of Tradesports, a very popular fantasy sports prediction market platform. Ron’s guidance and advice has been invaluable to the Augur team as there isn’t anyone who has been as successful as he has in building a prediction market platform.

Founder & CEO, InTrade Founder & CEO, Tradesports

Houman ShadabHouman B. Shadab is a prolific and influential expert in financial law and regulation. His research focuses on financial technology, hedge funds, derivatives, securitization, commercial transactions, and blockchains such as Bitcoin. He has provided our team great general insight regarding the legal framework around Blockchain technology.

Professor of Law, New York Law School Director, Center for Business and Financial Law

Joe CostelloJoe has been a CEO for 25 years and has been an innovator in the electronic design automation (EDA) space where he has been the recipient of the Phil Kaufman Award, the highest accolade in the EDA Industry. He has served on the board of companies like Oracle, Macromedia, Clarify and Mercury Interactive. Joe’s longevity, leadership and business savvy have benefitted the Augur team in numerous ways that all have led to positive outcomes.

CEO, Enlighted

Dr. Abe OthmanDr. Othman is a visiting scholar in the Operations and Information Management Department of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Othman’s received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon in 2012 and was named to Forbes “30 for 30” in the field of Energy. Dr. Othman’s contributions to the project are rather large and he has even written a guest blog post expanding on Augur’s use of Automated Market Makers.

Researcher, Wharton University

Augur Press:Augur wants to revolutionize forecasting (2016 MAX Award Finalist) – Atlanta Business ChronicleEthereum-powered Augur brings its beta to Microsoft Azure - International Business Times

Blockchain Prediction Market Enters Beta – CoindeskBitcoin Is Growing up - an Infographic of the Bitcoin Ecosystem – Bitcoin MagazineThe Art of Forecasting: Augur’s Decentralized Prediction Market - Inside Bitcoins

Next-gen prediction market to test limits in D.C. - Zachary Warmbrodt, Politico

New tech promises government-proof prediction markets (article & video) - Maxim Lott, Fox News

Augur May Become the Greatest Gambling Platform in History -Jim Epstein, Reason

Augur’s crowdsale raises $1.3 million in 26 hours - Kyt Dotson, SiliconANGLEAugur stakes its reputation on the wisdom of the crowd – Ian Allison, International Business TimesBitBeat: Ethereum Opens Its ‘Frontier’ for Business – Paul Vigna, The Wall Street JournalVapor No More: Ethereum Has Launched – Jon Evans, TechCrunchBitcoin Trends In 2015 (Named Top 5 Most Exciting Projects of 2015) – Coinbase.com BlogAugur a ‘Breakthrough’ Finalist at Exponential Finance 2015– Giulio Prisco, Bitcoin MagazineAugur Creates First Contract With Ethereum – Alyssa Hertig, CoinTelegraphAugur Bets on Bright Future for Blockchain Prediction Markets – Pete Rizzo, Coindesk

Augur Audio & Video:How Augur Works Video (Narrated by Shooter Jennings)

Augur: An Introduction To A Decentralized Prediction Market

Marketing Blockchain & Ethereum dApps: Tony Sakich of Augur

Reputation 101: How Augur's Reputation Tokens Work

Let’s Talk Bitcoin Podcast #222: Understanding Augur (Interview with Joey Krug & Tony Sakich)

TWiT: Floss Weekly 342: Augur (Interview with Joey Krug & Dr. Jack Peterson)

Additional Augur Resources:

Augur Betahttp://augur.net

Official Reputation Token Crowdsale Sitehttp://sale.augur.net

Augur Whitepaper by Dr. Jack Peterson & Joey Krughttp://www.augur.link/augur.pdf

Official Augur Bloghttp://blog.augur.net

Augur Code on GitHubhttp://github.com/AugurProject

Augur on Twitterhttp://twitter.com/augurproject

Augur on Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/augurproject

Augur on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnQRWIWIT8ExlegLTajjhiQ

Notable Quotes on Augur & Prediction Markets

“Thought: Dorian Nakamoto saga illustrates pressing need for Bitcoin-based prediction market. That’s something we’d love to fund.”Marc Andreessen, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz

"Augur looks pretty interesting. (A) Decentralized Prediction market. This could produce some incredibly useful data/APIs”Brian Armstrong, CEO & Co-Founder of Coinbase

"Augur offers the promise of prediction markets that are decentralized and hard for any one person to censor or stop or prevent. That would allow a wider range of possibilities."Dr. Robin Hanson, Chief Scientist, Consensus Point

"I think Augur is one of the most promising applications of blockchain technology out there; prediction markets have the potential to serve a very valuable purpose in society, and be a key ingredient in a very wide array of applications, and Augur is well-positioned to take that niche."Vitalik Buterin, Founder of Ethereum - 2014 World Technology Award & 2014 Thiel Fellowship Winner

"Prediction markets are a powerful tool for crowdsourcing information from the free market. Augur's decentralized design makes that technology - and information - widely available, a transformative and positive event."Jeff Garzik, Bitcoin Core Developer & Founder of Dunvegan Space Systems Inc.

"Augur now sets the standard in prediction markets. Polling and consumer research are just two industries that will be completely disrupted by this technology. Any industry that benefits by having accurate forecasting will come to embrace Augur."Max Keiser, Host of Keiser Report & Awarded First Patent in Prediction Market Space for HSX.com

“The prediction market that I always wish existed.”Dr. Abe Othman, Researcher at Wharton

"The potential for Augur is really about the distributed participation from the exchange operators as well as from the exchange users & the ability to distribute that in the way that they propose has never been done" Ron Bernstein, Founder,  Tradesports, InTrade

"Prediction markets, to the extent that they have a central point of failure, are necessarily limited in their usefulness, staying power, and authenticity. Augur finally brings decentralization to prediction markets, and if you're not scared and fascinated by the potential therein, then you're not paying attention."Erik Voorhees, Founder, Satoshi Dice, Coinapult

“A world of economic productivity & free exchange is going to require disintermediation, which is a movement toward peer-to-peer technological engagement. Augur is an important and progressive step in that direction.”Jeffrey Tucker, CLO, Liberty.me

"Augur is poised to revolutionize not only the way future events are analyzed, but, by combining the wisdom of crowds with monetary incentives for individuals, how information is reported as well. It's made possible by the team's brilliant implementation of blockchain technology."Houman Shadab, Professor of Business and Financial Law, New York Law School

Frequently Asked Questions:

What’s a prediction market (PM)?Similar to a stock market, a PM is a market where individuals can buy and sell shares. But unlike a stock market, which speculates on the future value of a company, a prediction market exists to determine the likelihood of an outcome of a future event. For a example, a prediction market could ask, “Will Jeb Bush be elected president in 2016?” If “Yes” shares cost $0.43, that can be understood as the likelihood of Bush being elected (43%). Repeated economic and academic studies have found prediction markets to be one of the world’s most accurate forecasting tools, especially when seeded with real money, and enough liquidity and trading volume (a problem that has traditionally existed with PMs.)

What makes Augur different from InTrade?Many elements separate Augur from traditional prediction markets, but most important, is the fact that our software is global and decentralized; anyone, anywhere in the world can access and use Augur, potentially bringing unprecedented liquidity, volume, and a diversity of perspectives and topics unseen in prior iterations of prediction markets.  

There are a bunch of competitors to Augur, right?Actually, no. There are none. “Truthcoin”, which provided the intellectual and economic skeleton for Augur, was an academic exercise by Yale statistician, Paul Sztorc, who sits on our advisory board. However, he has no intentions of actually developing the project, nor does anyone else (although there have been previous light-hearted attempts.) There are a few bitcoin-based prediction markets, but they’ve hardly achieved volume due to their total centralization (and lack of reliability due to bitcoin’s volatility.) On that note…How do you plan to manage the massive volatility issues that exist in most cryptocurrencies?Obviously, a prediction market must reward its participants for being right, and not for buying bitcoin at the right time. Thus, bitcoin only serves as an intermediary in our system. We will use a “stablecoin” tacked to the price of the U.S. dollar (so long as BTC is significantly more volatile) within Augur. An example of stablecoins already exists in NuBits.

There are two manners in which we can implement this system. Our initial plan was to harness Blockstream’s two-way-pegged sidechains to move BTC to the stablecoin in our system. However, Vitalik (@Ethereum) enlightened us to the possibility of using a crosschain into a decentralized exchange within Augur, to convert all incoming cryptocurrencies into the stablecoin we use. Either will likely work, and whatever proves most practical/reliable will be our choice.

Why a nonprofit? Don’t you want to make money?A few core misunderstandings engender this question:1 Just because the Forecast Foundation (the legal entity behind Augur) is a not-for-profit corporation, that

does not mean we cannot receive salaries for our work that are commensurate to our effort (although we do pay ourselves less than market rates.)

2 A nonprofit does not mean we are tax-exempt (we are not.) However, we believe that because the Foundation’s stated and intended purpose is to build “open-source, public forecasting tools”, we could easily fall under 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.

3 We are a fully decentralized organization/application. Just like Bitcoin. We have zero control over Augur or what is done on it. That being said, like Bitcoin, there are core developers that have the ability to push out updates, patches, and changes, upon the agreement of the Augur community.

Because Augur is fully decentralized, we actually have zero reason to be a for-profit entity. There is no ownership of the software.  There is ownership of Reputation (REP), but Reputation should be seen more as a maintenance tool than any sort of investment token. This leads to the next question…

So HOW do you make money?The money raised in our Reputation token offering, will be used to pay the Forecast Foundation’s employees, mostly core developers, salaries for the foreseeable future (until a tool like Lighthouse can

provide a community-based crowdfunding tool for Augur’s sustained development.)A small percentage of all Reputation (which will be entirely distributed at the end of the token offering) will be allocated to the Augur team and to some of our key advisors. Because half of all trading fees are allocated to responsible Reputation holders after each reporting cycle, this gives us a strong incentive to maintain and build this software over the long term, as REP only becomes valuable as volume and usage grows over the course of time.

How does Reputation (REP) work?Reputation can be thought of as a sort of “score” attached to an individual’s public & private address & is both divisible and exchangeable like bitcoin. However, that is where the similarities to cryptocurrency end.

REP is fully distributed before the full launch of Augur, based on the amount of responsibility (and money) individuals decide to put into the software. We emphasize responsibility, because that is what holding REP requires. Augur can only be decentralized so long as there is a decentralized oracle solution to our software. That is what Reputation provides. Those who hold REP are expected, every eight weeks, to report on the outcome of a random selection of closed events/predictions in the system. This is done by simply selecting three options: Yes (event occurred), No (it did not), or Ambiguous /Unethical (which, if this option achieves a consensus, pushes the reporting back to the next period, before eventually being closed without resolution.) Reporters have a period in which to do this.

Reporting should be a fairly intuitive process, as most markets will have had time before the voting period to auto-resolve themselves (as rational actors will be incentivized to sell their losing shares before a market reaches zero value, leading most markets to have 99-to-1 odds at closing time.)  If markets have not

resolved themselves, this may require Reputation holders to do some Googling; but more likely it is that the decision in question will have been poorly worded, undeterminable, or unethical, and thus reporters should mark the decision as such.

If Reputation holders fail to report on the outcome of events assigned to them during the two-week voting period, or report dishonestly, principle component analysis, PCA (to be explained at length in our blog), redistributes the lazy or dishonest Reputation holders’ REP to those who have reported both regularly and honestly. Also, only such REP holders will collect the trading fees from each voting cycle. This makes Augur the most meritocratic system in the blockchain space.

What about the legal / regulatory aspect of this?We have been in active, constructive communications with past and current members of key regulatory agencies, including the CFTC.

This legal analysis was written by one of our advisors (and two other friends of the project). Page 67 section b "Decentralized Applications," pg. 70 2. "Predictions Markets," and pg. 73 section c "Law and Decentralization" are the parts that relate to us. We think it captures our views on how regulators will approach this.

The law does not prohibit the creation of open-source, decentralized prediction market software, nor the distribution of of cryptocurrency tokens. In fact, writing source-code is a protected activity under the First Amendment as demonstrated in Junger v. Daly.

We have examined legal precedents and case law, our legal advisory is world-class and we are being entirely transparent about what we are building.

Augur Accolades

Augur’s Tony Sakich quoted alongside Tyler Winklevoss of

Gemini and TigerDirect, Coinbase and BItPay executives in Bitcoin Magazine’s “Bitcoin Is

Growing Up” Ecosystem Infographic.

MAX Awards FinalistNamed Finalist by Atlanta Business Chronicle & Georgia State with

Coca-Cola, Atlanta Hawks, Cricket Wireless & Fortune 500 companies.

The Augur Reputation Token Crowdsale

augur.net

The First 48 Hours

Total USD: $1.7 millionBitcoin Raised: 4185.69391816 BTCEther Raised: 548763.32048363

Final ResultsTotal USD: $5.3 MillionBitcoin Raised: 18813.02498 BTCEther Raised: 1176816.436 ETHNumber of Accounts: 4550

In Top 25 Highest-Funded Crowdfunding Campaigns in History