Ethereum’s oldest prediction market Augur has kicked off a fork to test its dispute system, forcing REP holders to migrate tokens.
Augur, one of Ethereum’s oldest prediction markets, is running a fork to test its dispute system and show that REP holders, the platform’s governance token, can decide what’s true without a central authority.
The Augur fork, explained in a Wednesday post on X, is set up in two parts:
- From April to June, REP holders can take part in a test where they bet on which outcome is correct.
- Then, from June to August, a two-month migration window opens, and everyone should move their REP to the set of markets that reflects the true outcome of the disputed event, or their old tokens will be stuck and lose value.
The Lituus Foundation, which funds ongoing development, said in the X post that crypto exchanges Kraken and Gate.io may help with migration, though “support is not yet confirmed.”
At press time, Augur’s price hasn’t moved much, with REP trading around $0.88 and a market cap of $7.8 million, according to CoinGecko.
Read more: DOJ and CFTC Sue Illinois Over Prediction Market Regulation
Augur Fork Timeline
The fork comes about five months after Ethereum developer and Augur contributor Micah Zoltu collected 200,000 REP tokens through a crowdsourcing contract to fund the Augur v2 fork. Zoltu said the goal was to filter out passive REP holders and ensure the network’s governance system works as intended.
Launched in 2018 by Joey Krug, Jack Peterson, and Jeremy Gardner, Augur was one of Ethereum’s first prediction markets. Despite being an early pioneer, it never gained the attention of newer platforms like Polymarket or Kalshi.
Part of the reason was technical. Early on, Augur relied on a “free third-party node service that was slow, unreliable, and frequently provided incorrect blockchain data,” according to analysts at blockchain infrastructure firm Alchemy.
Today, Augur has about $1.7 million in total value locked, per data from DefiLlama, which is a fraction of Polymarket’s current $428.8 million.
Read also: What’s Happening With Prediction Markets in the US: A Look at Recent Initiatives
