We are extremely excited to announce our investment in Guesser, the easiest way to engage with Augur prediction markets.
Among all the crypto opportunities, we are most excited about crypto native opportunities – and prediction markets are clearly native. We spent some time with Augur right after it launched (you can read about that initial experience here). The potential to create millions of markets around any potential outcome in the world – from sports to elections, weather and stock prices – is pretty amazing.
When I first engaged with Augur eight months ago, two key challenges stood out: 1) the UI / UX was complicated and 2) there were questions about regulation.
Guesser has an answer to both challenges. It has created a super simple interface to interact with Augur, in the same way that Coinbase create the easiest and most beautiful experience to buy and sell crypto currencies. Guesser can make investing in prediction markets as attractive and frictionless as investing in coins and stocks. They began with just a few markets – but it was enough to see the potential. And they’ve just expanded to four dedicated sections for weekly events on Crypto (BTC, ETC, Maker…), Finance (IPOs, derivatives…), Politics and General News.
Secondly, the Guesser team is based in Madrid and European regulators are much more welcoming to crypto start-ups and online betting activity (which some of the activity on Guesser could be characterized).
We led this round of investment (a $1.1m seed round) together with our friends at Compound with participation from Boost VC.
It is very early days for decentralized prediction markets, but we are excited to see the Guesser team shaping some of these opportunities going forward.
