Why Did the Augur Price Surge by 38% Yesterday?

Augur jumped over 38 percent yesterday, rising a further 12 percent at the start of trading today to complete one of the most eye-catching runs in recent market history. After the huge dip cryptocurrencies took last Thursday, only a few altcoins have shown progress on the market in the last week but  Augur’s huge jump in a little over 18 hours is generating a significant amount of interest.

Markets Respond to Veil Mainnet Launch

A lot of this movement can be attributed to the launch of the Veil platform which was designed to run on Augur using the 0x protocol. To understand why Veil’s launch is having such an effect on Augur, it is important to examine what it brings to the table and why the market is so excited about it. Augur, which launched in 2018 promised a decentralised and censorship-free Ethereum-based peer-to-peer prediction market experience.

As with a number of DApps which launched amid great fanfare, Augur turned out to have a few significant flaws that affected its adoption. Apart from the initial furore generated by the appearance of assassination markets for Donald Trump and other predictable embarrassments, the platform has been criticised for its relatively slow speed and delayed payment system, both of which overtime have discouraged users from trading on it.

Veil builds on Augur and offers a solution to the low speed and laggy payout problems In a blogpost announcing the launch of the Veil mainnet, the platform revealed that it will run on the 0x protocol which offers speedy trading and immediate payouts. While this instant settlement feature is optional, it appears to be a great incentive as there has been an increased number of new users since the announcement.

An excerpt from the launch announcement reads:

Our goal is to bring Augur and peer-to-peer markets mainstream. We foresee a not-so-distant future where millions of people create and trade in millions of markets. And we’re thrilled to finally launch Veil on mainnet and bring that future just a little closer.

Since the launch of the platform, REP has jumped from $10.60 to  $16 and daily volume grew from $6.8 million to $46.5 million all within 18 hours. Apart from the Veil launch, a newer version of the Augur app has also just been released, which likely has also contributed to the surge in REP’s price. With $175 million in market cap, REP now sits at the 33^rd spot after an almost 80 percent surge over the past 18 hours.