The Augur Crowdsale is now over and I wanted to personally thank everyone who supported what we are doing here at Augur over the past 45 days. I decided that a blog post from a personal perspective would be a good way to share my thoughts and some other updates.
When I joined the team, I learned that a crowdsale was actually the best method of token distribution and more importantly that it’s necessary for our decentralized oracle system to work. That didn’t change my skepticism of crowdsales, I immediately recognized that explaining our reasoning would be difficult and challenging, but that’s where the fun part came in too. It makes me so happy that so many participated and chose to trust Augur in a time when many other projects are having crowdsales for less-than-honest reasons. The support not only will help with development, but those who are now REP Token holders will serve as the backbone of what we do.
Around the same time in January many other things were discussed, our strategy was laid out and we made it a point to be simple and honest, thankfully our belief in this strategy appears to have paid off even greater than we anticipated.
The past two weeks have been a period of shifting priorities, changes and a ton of internal discussion regarding the future of Augur. One thing that became quite apparent to both myself and the team was that the role of marketing was going to be drastically reduced during the development phase, which is why my role will still be intact, but pared back as it's important that Augur's resources are allocated properly. I will still be in the same role, but my responsibilities will be significantly reduced and I will be taking on other projects during this time. My original agreement was only to be with Augur through the crowdsale, thankfully the team was happy with my work so I was asked to stay on to help out with assorted things during the development phase. I can still be reached by email at tony@augur.net and will be happy to provide interviews, answer questions and refer inquiries to the other team members. The only difference from now and pre-crowdsale will be the hours I spent on Marketing activities
In my entire professional career, I have never been more impressed by a team of individuals as I was by the Augur team. Augur's cofounders, Joey Krug and Jack Peterson are going to be expanding the development team to gear up for the coming months. I'm very confident that the people they bring on will be fantastic. Additionally, Augur’s transparency and openness with the community will continue through this process.
You will be collaborating in building a html5 client for a fully decentralized prediction market. Working with 1-2 other developers on a react/flux client that communicates with an ethereum dapp backend.
Desired Skills:
- solid foundation in data structures, algorithms and software design
- strong understanding of javascript and html5 frameworks (preferable react/flux)
- experience testing code
- a passion to build cutting-edge technologies that impact the world
- strong desire to learn and grow
- experience with ethereum or decentralized technologies a plus
- strong understanding on asynchronous data communication
- can work remotely
Augur is a decentralized prediction market platform built on Ethereum, which just concluded its $5.2 million token sale. Augur is built around a core of smart contracts, which contain all the functionality needed for prediction markets. We're seeking a full-time developer to help with the ongoing design and development of these contracts.
Desired Skills:
- strong knowledge of blockchain technology (Ethereum/Bitcoin)
- coding versatility: ability to pick up new programming languages and/or paradigms quickly
- experience (whether paid or self-taught) with either Serpent or Solidity is a big plus -- our contracts are presently written in Serpent, although we may be migrating them to Solidity in the near future
- experience working with "mission critical" systems: if you have real-world experience working with systems where any errors/bugs would cause catastrophic damage (or just invariably be exploited), contact us! In some ways this is the most important qualification of all.
The upcoming development process is going to be incredibly important and we want to encourage everyone to stay excited but also to be prepared for all of the fun and stressful occurrences that happen during this process. Our timeline is estimated as things can and do happen, I’m positive the team will continue to be as communicative and transparent with the public as we have been thus far.
