Finding the Pulse for Mainstream Crypto Utility
2020 will go down in history as the year of an unprecedented number of firsts. From global toilet paper shortage to the first Best Picture win for a non-English language film at the Academy Awards, a female Vice President in the US, and the rise of WFH (work from home), 2020 left an indelible footprint in the sands of time. The DeFi sector started in 2020 as a $191m black sheep of the financial industry. Towards the end of the year, it shaped up to be a $721m toast of the town.
Four months into 2021, the market cap now sits at $1.9T with no sign of letting up.
But what if you could have predicted these outcomes? Better yet, what if you could trade on these predictions? Wouldn’t it be great if you could create your prediction markets and trade on anything that catches your fancy?
With prediction markets, you can.
Calling Nostradamus
The prediction market is a behemoth of an industry, an occurrence marketplace that allows people to trade on an event’s outcome in the future. From an election to which foot Messi will score his next goal, the potential markets are as varied and diverse as the human imagination. Outcomes in this market are binary outputs; yes or no, 1 or 0, true or false. Participants buy and sell the contracts to these outputs that get resolved based on the real-world data brought on-chain.
Despite sharing a similar lexicon, the prediction industry is as far removed from gambling as night is to day. The payoff is dependent on the analytical skills of the participant rather than arbitrary dice rolls. The market relies on collective wisdom rather than Lady Luck, making it one of the most efficient markets due to the diverse knowledge base leveraged to arrive at a binary output.
By polling analysis and opinion from a diverse crowd to forecast the outcome of an event, the prediction market also taps into the wisdom of crowds, offering collective insights into solving a problem that a single professional may not have the bandwidth to pull. These markets rely on the notion that an economic stake is the clearest indicator of market sentiment.
Diversity is the core strength of prediction markets, and decentralization is critical for crowd wisdom. However, the industry’s reliance on centralized operators, draconic regulations, and high service fees limits market participation.
What’s Your Pulse?
Powered by Flux Protocol’s open financial market infrastructure, Pulse is a decentralized and open-source prediction platform governed and maintained by a DAO. This mobile-friendly platform has been designed and developed with the mainstream user in mind, enabling them to quickly:
- Create markets for anything
- Stake assets on the outcome of any market and earn fees, and
- Seamlessly provide liquidity for markets
By leveraging the non-custodial NEAR wallet, Pulse sidesteps the accessibility pitfalls dogging the industry, creating an open market where participants can leverage cryptocurrencies’ borderless nature with their real-time settlement potential to create and trade any market immediately. Now, rather than having an address that starts with 0x and ends up looking like the equation for recreating the universe, you can have your wallet address read “pulse.near”
Leveraging Flux’s Oracle, users can connect to more than one oracle to aggregate results; Pulse is a 24/7 trading powerhouse for users to take advantage of fast-paced markets across all time zones. Users are always in control of their funds, shares, and contracts at all times.
Built by the community for the community
The Pulse infrastructure is a fork of the Flux Open-Source app that the Flux core team and community members developed to deliver a genuinely decentralized trading experience. Pulse is entirely open-source and can never be shut down.
Why use Pulse?
The community fully controls the Pulse trading experience, which means that you can vote on upgrade proposals to the AMM, Front-end, etc. On top of being fully permissionless, we can offer markets that resolve in 30 minutes with API data and 24 hours for Arbitrary data by integrating the Flux Oracle.
I’m from Ethereum — can I use Pulse?
Yes! You definitely can! Markets are denominated in DAI, USDC, USDT, NEAR, or even wrapped ETH. Token holders of Pulse can vote to whitelist new collateral types using the DAO. To bring funds from Ethereum to NEAR, simply connect your Ethereum wallet and create a NEAR wallet.
Try it now!
NEAR Rainbow Bridge to Ethereum
Or if you would instead buy $DAI on NEAR, try out Ref Finance, a new AMM on NEAR:
Ref Finance App
Will Pulse have a token?
Yes Pulse, will have a governance token giving the community complete control over the front-end, AMM, market curation, and collateral token whitelists into the future. Token distribution mechanics, support from partners, and maybe an Airdrop will be announced over the next couple of weeks; make sure to try out the Pulse app!
How do I get a Frontrow Ticket?
Staking your claim for a place in our ecosystem is as simple as ticking off these easy steps:
1. Follow Pulse on Twitter https://twitter.com/pulsemarkets?s=21
2. Follow Flux on Twitter https://twitter.com/fluxprotocol?s=21
3. Retweet Pulse launch tweet! https://twitter.com/pulsemarkets/status/1379405259949420548?s=21
4. Join both Flux and Pulse telegram Channels https://t.me/pulsemarkets & https://t.me/fluxprotocol
5. Fill out the google doc with all pertinent information https://forms.gle/PeB9NVo8QF7EUoWF9
Don’t have $NEAR? Just follow this two easy steps:
1. Go to https://faucet.paras.id/ to create a free NEAR account
2. Take your xyz.near address and go follow above steps to whitelist
Thank you very much for hopping aboard this journey with us! We look forward to the road ahead and exciting times!