In the past two years, the oracle project Link has brought us too many surprises. The scene of Link private sale before 4 Sept can be vividly remembered by everyone. Both the prediction machine 2 years ago and the current prediction market platform PlotX adopt a similar prediction mechanism. Can this kind of Defi ecosystem expansion lead the market trend in the next 2 years? Is PlotX the Link in the Defi ecosystem? Will decentralized prediction market platforms occupy the underlying applications of Defi in the future?
Today, we are glad to invite Kartic Rakhra and Eylon Aviv from the PlotX project to come to our community and show us how PlotX makes trading and prediction simple.
Hi Kartic Rakhra and Eylon, welcome to our AMA. Would you please give us an introduction of your team?
Eylon: I’ll start off by telling a bit about the cofounders of PlotX.
Ish Goel, Founding Member of PlotX.io entered the Ethereum ecosystem back in 2016. Along with Nitika, Ish won the London Blockchain Week Hackathon in 2017 and joined Nexus Mutual as the CTO.
Nitika Goel, Founding Member of PlotX.io entered the Ethereum ecosystem in 2016 and has served as the Lead Developer of Nexus Mutual. She also co-founded GovBlocks, an on-chain governance toolkit. She was also the author of the ERC1132 lockable token standard on Ethereum.
Kartic Rakhra, Founding Member of PlotX.io entered the Ethereum ecosystem in 2017 and co-founded GovBlocks along with Ish & Nitika. He also set up India’s largest blockchain community via the India Blockchain Week in partnership with Fintech Worldwide.
Eylon Aviv, Head of partnership at DAOstack, founder of builder collective, and leading member of DXdao, involved in several decentralized governance projects.
Satheesh A, Founding Member of PlotX.io entered the crypto ecosystem in 2019. He comes with 25 years of experience working on CXO positions in the IT sector across marquee organizations like Cognizant, BORN and various others.
17+ other members that have been working on PlotX via Somish Blockchain Labs.
We also recorded a Intro Video — http://youtube.com/watch?v=eNuOlkAVKys
Thanks for your introduction. Here comes the first question of our AMA.
Q1:PlotX is a very innovative project.Would you please give us a brief introduction of PlotX?
Eylon：PlotX is a non-custodial prediction protocol that enables users to earn rewards on high-yield prediction markets.
Dubbed as the Uniswap of Prediction Markets, PlotX uses an Automated Market Making algorithm to create, settle markets and distribute rewards on the Ethereum Blockchain without any counterparty risk. Markets are focused on crypto-pairs like BTC, ETH, YFI etc and are automatically created in intervals of 1h, 1d and 1w.
PlotX also uses on-chain governance powered by GovBlocks.
Kartic: In addition to what Eylon just said, there’s an interesting article that was written by IHODL giving a succinct explanation of what PlotX is.
A DeFi prediction market, PlotX provides traders with an alternative way of gaining exposure to crypto assets other than market buying them; instead they can enter prediction markets, where they can earn yield for correctly determining which way a particular asset will move.
Read more at https://ihodl.com/analytics/2020-10-08/four-uniswap-tokens-should-be-your-radar/
Q2: We understand that PlotX is a decentralized futures trading platform. What are the advantages of the decentralized futures trading platform when compared with the centralized one?
Kartic：PlotX is a decentralized prediction market protocol — which is similar to a futures trading solution, but a lot more simplied.
For the most part of the short history of prediction markets, Traditional Centralized prediction markets dominated the narrative of prediction markets. However, traditional prediction markets come with their own set of problems which have hindered their mass appeal.
The major challenges in the traditional prediction markets are:
1. Counterparty Risk
2. High Cost
3. Inability to showcase provably fair settlements.
4. Liquidity
These challenges reduce the effectiveness of the platform and compromise on the user experience.
You can read more about it here — https://medium.com/plotx/moving-on-from-traditional-prediction-markets-a58c5d288b93
Q3:Could you tell us the advantages and disadvantages of PlotX, Augur and Synthetix?
Eylon: We have a lot of respect for what other prediction platforms like Augur, HXRO, Synthetic options have done and how they are evolving.
We believe there’s still a fair bit of room to innovate in the space for PlotX to capitalise and grow.
We have detailed the differences that PlotX holds from some of the others mentioned above, here:
Q4：In your team’s opinion, what kind of opportunities does Defi bring to the current market? As a new type of Defi project, can PlotX reactivate the current market?
Eylon：I think the biggest opportunity that PlotX opens for DeFi traders is the “alternative way of gaining exposure to crypto assets other than market buying them”; instead the traders can now enter prediction markets, where they can earn yield for using their skill in correctly determining which way a particular asset will move on hourly, daily & weekly markets.
This is Ethereum’s 1st AMM based prediction market. More than 10,000 predictions have been made on PlotX testnet by over 2400 unique users in about 2 months.
We truly believe that the innovation in prediction markets can lead to mass mainstream adoption of DeFi applications and that PlotX is a stepping stone in that direction.
Q5：PlotX actually adopt an oracle mechanism, so will PlotX provide the data generated under this mechanism to the data demander for benefits?
Eylon：Absolutely. PlotX protocol is permissionless. Anyone can access any data on the PlotX ecosystem by querying the Ethereum smart contracts. Being permissionless and providing transparency to users has been at the core of the design principle for PlotX.
PlotX uses oracles for getting on-chain price feed of different markets. The community can further build on top of PlotX to further access relevant information.
Q6: What will be the next important milestone for PlotX after coin-issuing?
Eylon: We started working on PlotX back in Feb after moving on from Nexus Mutual. The public alpha was released on Aug 4 on the kovan test net.
Since then over 2400 unique addresses have made more than 10,000 predictions on the alpha.
We’ve partnered with the following projects.
1. Matic to explore layer 2 scaling
2. Deep Work Studio to revamp the UX of the dapp
3. Ankr for Ethereum API access
4. CertiK for Smart Contract Security Audit
A lot more are in the works and will be announced pretty soon. We have a lot of updates and announcements coming up. I’ll share our roadmap for the next few months where you can see our next milestones.
Here comes the free Q&A session, we selected 4 questions:
User 1: What‘s the different between PlotX and Payaso?
Kartic: Thanks for the question! PlotX is a prediction protocol, while Payaso is an insurance protocol. There’s a difference in how Prediction Markets work in comparison to Insurance, with respect to capital efficiency. It wouldn’t be right to compare PlotX with Payaso. We have provided a detailed comparison of PlotX with our prediction market solutions on this link: https://docs.plotx.io/faqs#how-is-plotx-different-from-projects-like-augur-synthetix-binary-options-and-hxro
User 2: Why not choose Loopring instead of Matic as the Lay2 expansion solution?
Eylon: For now Loopring doesn’t support a full EVM compatibility which we need for PlotX, but we are definitly open for it.
User 3: What is the use case of PLOT Token?
Kartic: Full details on the PLOT token utility can be seen at this link: https://docs.plotx.io/plot-token/token-model
User 4: How does PlotX handle and avoid the security and liquidity risks in the DeFi field, such as contract vulnerabilities, network attacks, over-authorization, and liquidation caused by the black swan incident?
Eylon: All of our contracts have been audited by CertiK and our code have been reviewed by several prominent entities in the blockchain space, that being said, the real test will be in the continuous use of the product and funds locked over time in the contracts.
Regarding black swan events and other liquidity issues, our protocol is aimed at short term prediction markets so unless the entire market fully collapses within a very short time frame this issue is mitigated considerably compared to our prediction markets / protocols.
Judy: Thanks Kartic and Eylon for joining our AMA and sharing so much valuable information with us. Thank you all for watching this AMA. EncryptClub will work hard and bring more wonderful content for you in future.
