Gnosis is a prediction market platform built as a decentralized application (dapp) on the Ethereum network. The platform includes a multisig wallet as well as a Dutch Exchange, but we’re just going to focus on their flagship product, the prediction market, for this guide. More than just building a prediction market, though, Gnosis is creating an entire infrastructure layer that you can use to build your own prediction market app. A prediction market utilizes user predictions to aggregate information about future events. Users in the market trade tokens that represent the outcome of a certain event. Because some outcomes are more likely to occur than others, these tokens end up having different values in the open market.Olympia is Gnosis’s test version of their prediction market app. They host free tournaments in this product, so you get a chance to try it out without having to spend money. Every two days, the team allocates you a certain amount of Olympia (OLY) tokens that you use to bet on different prediction markets. If you do well in the market, you win Gnosis (GNO) tokens. You can sell GNO on the open market which gives them some monetary value. The next phase of Gnosis is its Management Interface. The team released a beta version in December 2017 but haven’t announced a date for the main net release. The Management Interface is basically your dashboard for Gnosis’s prediction markets. It’s here that you check your balance, participate in markets, and even create your own market. Gnosis includes two types of tokens: Gnosis (GNO) and OWL. GNO are the ERC20 tokens that the team sold during their ICO. They created 10 million GNO tokens and aren’t minting any additional ones. These are the tokens that you see being traded on the open market. By staking GNO, you receive OWL tokens. To do this, you must lock your GNO in a smart contract making them non-transferable. The amount of OWL you receive is dependent on the length of your lock period as well as the total supply of OWL tokens in the market. The team is aiming to have 20x more total OWL than the average amount of monthly OWL usage over the previous 3 months. The Gnosis team is led by Martin Köppelmann (CEO), Stefan George (CTO), and Dr. Friederike Ernst (COO). Köppelmann and George began working on the platform in January 2015 as one of the first ConsenSys partners. By August of that same year, they launched the alpha product as the first major dapp on Ethereum. In April 2017, the project held somewhat of a controversial Initial Coin Offering (ICO). Using a dutch auction style of raising funds, the team hit their $12.5 million hard cap in ten minutes while retaining 95% of the tokens. Amidst backlash, the team locked the tokens in a vault and have promised not to dump them on the market. They’ll give at least a three-month warning before selling any of the tokens. The team includes quite a list of reputable advisors including Joseph Lubin (Ethereum co-founder and ConsenSys founder) and Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum founder and chief scientist).
Aion is a revolutionary multi-tier blockchain platform that has been created to solve the pressing issue of limited operability between existing blockchains while still remaining capable of handling its own applications. It supports custom blockchain architectures, and it provides cross-chain interoperability. The Aion project comes at a very appropriate period, in a time where there’s an ever-growing number of blockchains.Thus, interoperability is more important now that it ever has been. Interoperability will expand the horizons of multiple other blockchain platforms, not to mention those of enterprise-oriented companies. The project is led by Matthew Spoke, the CEO of Nuco and board member on the EEA. Other big names include Jin Tu, Nuco’s CTO, who has more than 15 years of experience in enterprise engineering and more than four years in the blockchain industry, and Peter Vessenes who has co-founded the Bitcoin Foundation. The token is the blockchain’s power-source. It’s used for securing the network, for creating new blockchains, as well as for monetizing inter-chain bridges. AION token is actually an ERC-20 token. In fact, the token is first offered as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, and only then it can be changed to the official AION network token. When that happens, the token can freely stream between two blockchains. The best thing about this is that investors are not required to change their Aion Ethereum token (ERC-20) for the Aion-1 token, as they will always be interchangeable. In order to buy AION, you will need to first purchase another cryptocurrency, preferably Bitcoin or Ethereum. Fortunately, AION is supported by some very popular crypto exchanges out there such as BitForex, Binance, Ethfinex, Liqui, and Bancor Network. There's a good chance that Aion, with its unique approach of solving interoperability issues, will become somewhat of a necessity for the cryptosphere in the following period.