What is Augur v2?

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.

The Augur Protocol is an attempt to try to solve one of the most difficult problems confronting software engineers working to develop practical applications for blockchain technology, particularly smart contracts, the oracle problem. Augur is a trustless decentralized peer to peer oracle employed on a predictive market protocol. The Augur oracle allows information to be migrated from the real world to a blockchain without relying on a trusted intermediary or third party.

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 Augur protocol is a set of immutable contracts that live and exist on the Ethereum public blockchain. The Augur protocol has no upgradability, modification ability, or governance over the set of contracts and software that run and exist on the Ethereum blockchain. No single entity can modify, alter, update, upgrade, censor or make any changes of any kind to the smart contract’s software. The Augur protocol retains no “admin key”, “ownership key”, or similar centralized aspects that are commonly found in other early staged blockchain decentralized applications. Any changes to the Augur protocol require an entire redeployment of the smart contract set, and thus a manual, opt-in migration to that set of contracts by the users of the Augur protocol.