Conspicuously missing from this article: Augur's business model. They presumably get a house take?
Conspicuously missing from this article: Augur's business model. They presumably get a house take?
Who got the $5 million?
The foundation to fund development (which they kept in Ether so is much more valuable than $5million when the sale happened).
He's right, it's a protocol. There is no method for them to take a cut. The protocol gives the fees to the REP holders who report the outcome by staking their REP tokens.
Tl;dr is that 80% went to public, 16% to founders and 4% to foundation.
So, no, I don't think they have a house take? However, the individual markets are each made by someone, and I believe that these "market makers" are financially rewarded through I guess a sort of a house take thing?
Fees on the Augur protocol go directly to the market creator and REP holders who report and dispute outcomes. The Forecast Foundation does not recieve any fees from actions, trades, markets or use on the Augur protocol.
I guess this has to do with them being a decentralized marketplace, which as the article discusses does have some cool perks.
In the USA, PredictIt.org is a site that is also aimed at prediction, but they take a 10% fee on profit, and then a 5% fee on withdrawal. Seemingly a lot more volume on their markets than Augur at the moment, with some of their markets having hundreds of thousands of shares traded, and thousands of comments.
https://www.predictit.org/About/HowItWorks?page=home
Edit: After I posted I now see that Gibsons77 gave a better and more concise answer to the question