Building a Crypto Weed App: Part 8 - Getting stuck with Augur
Creating a market on Augur is harder than it looks but with a last second breakthrough, I'm closer than ever
This blog documents my journey learning about crypto and new tech through a real world project. Get caught up:
Part 1 - Working Anonymously (first paid post, WIP)
Part 2 - Barebones API: Set up a bare bones Rails server
Part 3 - Going Live: Deploy site to Herkou
Part 4 - Pretty Things: Make site look good and SEO optimized
Part 5 - But really how much: Prices organized by location
Part 6 - Is Augur the Best Oracle for cluutch: Review of oracle technology
Part 7 - To mTurk, or not to mTurk: Assessing options for crowdsourcing prices
setting up a market on Augur
In Part 6, I explored different applications of a crypto oracle for the price of weed. Augur seems like the best platform for the use case. In this week’s installment I try to set up a market on Augur. Spoiler alert: this shit is tough and will have to finish setup next week.
It was really straight forward to start interacting with Augur. Augur.net redirects to an IPFS site with a standard warning and then redirects you to the UI.
Initially I assumed that trading was blocked because my wallet wasn’t registered with all the right contracts. I spent the horrible gas fees to register and was suprised to find I still couldn’t trade or create markets. I then realized that the redirection page itself had bolded the fact that the page would have trading disabled.
At this point I really didn’t understand how to move forward. With no fundamental understanding of Augur, I wasn’t sure if they had detected my country of origin and blocked me, if the trading UI was not in usable condition, if there was an older trading UI I should use, or something totally different.
augur research
Augur is a prediction market. This means you can bet on (predict) real world events like who would win the 2020 US election or the weather next year. The immediate goal of this blog is to build a market around the predicted price of weed, according to cluutch.io.
Agur’s most recent blog post was helpful for getting oriented.
Augur CE: Platform update allowing betting in different currencies.
Catnip & Election Markets: A trading interface for Augur. ONLY SUPPORTS ONE MARKET AT A TIME.
The Graph x Augur: Augur is working with The Graph for indexing.
Augur AMM: Augur is developing an Automated Market Maker.
REP v2 Migration: Augur is still in the process of migrating to REPv2.
Protocol Deep Dive - The Case for Invalid: Why invalid is a possible outcome in Augur.
After reading about Augur, I also took a moment to reconsider Synthetix. Some friends had positive reviews of Synthetix so I took another look. Going into the process, I thought I might be able to build an index for the price of weed (with 100% weighting from cluutch.io to start).
Previously, I had already purchased and staked some SNX. It was nice to log back in and see some earned interest.
On the other hand, gas prices are so crazy that it cost me around $100 just to buy SNX on exchange in the first place, transfer it to a Meta Mask wallet, do all the validations, and then perform the staking operation. If I want to stake 100 sUSD (equiv ~500 USD) right now, it will cost $44 in gas fees.
Ultimately, I didn’t really look into prediction market making with Synthetix. The UI is not centered around that feature, if it exists at all. I also spent a lot of time figuring out how I should manage treasury for all my crypto and the best way to acquire some SNX. Ultimately, I used some crypto I already had on Binance and converted there. Before resorting to that, I also tried trading ETH for iETH on dex.ag. I had issues syncing with my Ledger and moved on.
running Augur locally
I spent a good chunk of the day trying to get Augur running on my local machine. Augur is developped in a monorepo with three projects that I understand to be essential for my purposes: core, sdk, and ui. Check them out in the `packages/` dir of the monorepo.
I won’t got into the steps I tried because we ultimately couldn’t get it working. The UI and core both started easy but were probably not configured right. I could never get the SDK to run.
on the shoulders of giants
It is late Sunday night — the self imposed deadline for my weekly posts. This week was particularly hellish with grading for work (I’m a teacher) and today was the only time I had to work on cluutch. All excuses to say that minutes ago I was ready to give up on Augur and summarize my failures.
Fortunately I looked carefully at the #trading channel on the Augur Discord. There, you will find a link to an Augur client with trading activated. I clicked around a bit and started going through the motions of creating a new market.
The required fields aren’t too overwhelming. But I’m tired and want to put more intentionality into what I write, especially if it is going to live on chain. The basic idea is to make a market predicting the price for one ounce of weed in Florida will be less than $20 on June 30, 2021.
Of course, I don’t think that will be the real price, and I plan on being transparent about that. My hope is that the absurdly low price will: be an attention grabber and make people want to participate, encourage the community to use the API to find holes, and be a price that cannot be explained by normal price fluctuations.
I’ll explain next week, when I finish the process of creating the market. I’ll also have to clean up the API a bit and get better about inputting prices regularly. Thanks for reading. Talk to you next week.