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).
Waves is an open blockchain platform designed for ease of use and mass adoption. Anyone can use Waves to launch, distribute and trade their own crypto token. The platform is fully decentralised, transparent and auditable. Waves is inspired by NXT with team members previously being involved with NXT. Its name is inspired by the gravitational waves discovery. It is a cryptocurrency platform that had been coded for scratch and allows for asset issuance, decentralized crowdfunding, community management and encrypted messaging. Waves is creating a comprehensive blockchain ecosystem that will provide all the necessary features for business adoption, and the platform already has a number of powerful tools and services that make building user applications straightforward. Waves is a Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency that conducted its ICO from 12 April 2016 to 31 May 2016. It raised a total of $16 million worth of bitcoins during the ICO. There is a total of 100 million tokens of which 15 million tokens are reserved for bounties and the development team while the remaining 85 million tokens are distributed to ICO participants. Features: 1. Highly accessible - Clean & familiar UX, Chrome app or html lite client, No blockchain download necessary 2. Fast, low-cost and scalable - One-minute blocks, Low (0.001 WAVES) transaction fees, Tx fees can be paid in tokens, Up to 1,000 txs/second 3. Fiat transfer - Fully compliant & licensed gateways into and out of the blockchain, EUR blockchain tokens with USD and other currencies on the way, Tokens fully backed by fiat deposits, Bitcoin gateway and tokens also available. 4. Easy token operations - Launch a new crypto token in under a minute, Tools for mass token distribution, Ideal for crowdfunding 5. Decentralised exchange (DEX) - Peer-to-peer trading from within the client, Trade any pair of Waves tokens, Near-realtime order matching, Blockchain settlement for security 6. Smart contracts - Non-Turing complete, Powerful but secure