At Augur, we have always been the opposite of technological or business absolutists.
We have, time and time again, swiftly shifted our approach to many elements of this project, whether it’s with regards to technical limitations (pivoting from building off Bitcoin Core to Ethereum) or personnel changes (adding Tony Sakich, our marketing director, to what was an almost entirely engineering team, save for myself.)
So it should come as no surprise, to anyone who has followed us, that we will be pushing back the date of our software sale indefinitely until we receive an update from the folks at Ethereum. The May Day date has always been tentative, as Augur relies on much more than us.
In fact, the vast majority of our coding is completed.
However, Augur is built on top of Ethereum. And, for all of the benefits the decentralized publishing platform provides us, it must first launch, and be thoroughly tested, before we are comfortable beginning our software sale. Unfortunately, Ethereum’s delays have been holding back our UI development.
We want every token buyer to have been able to demo our software with satisfaction before participating in the sale. And unfortunately, we cannot have a solid working demo until Ethereum launches. With less than a month remaining until our sale, and Ethereum’s Frontier not yet up and running, we do not believe we can have an alpha that is entirely up to our standards. Thus, we are giving ourselves more time to build and test the best prediction market software ever, so our software sale can be a success, and Reputation is distributed to as many people as possible.
Ethereum’s setbacks have stemmed from mining, networking, and the block gas limit. The networking issues have been fixed: Ethereum nodes are now maintaining consensus and communicating across clients and platforms. The block gas limit has been raised to pi million, which is enough to support Augur contracts (the main barrier was getting them on the chain!) Lastly, after Ethereum switched to the new mining algorithm, it took them a while to work out some of the kinks, but now mining works on OS X and Ubuntu (a Windows fix should be coming shortly.)
Now that these three main issues are resolved, we're able to move on, full steam ahead, with UI development, and we'll have something ready in a matter of weeks!
Expect a new date to be announced shortly.
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me directly at jeremy@augur.net or tweet at us @AugurProject.
We appreciate the understanding with regards to this delay, but we promise the wait will be worth it!
Love,
The Augur Team
