Q: In your FAQ you mention that you will be offering onramp capabilities soon. Do you have anything to update us on that front?
A: We are targeting to have 1–2 external fiat onramp providers by the end of H1 this year with the first one by April. We are looking for not only fiat onramp for our users but also to eventually enable onramp of other crypto assets cross-chain.
Q: Are you exclusively using a 3rd party service (MagicLink) to handle wallet creation for customers? Is this something you intend to keep over time? What was the thought behind it? Is there a risk to customers of you (i.e. a disgruntled employee) or that 3rd party service keeping the wallet’s keys after creation or having some kind of backdoor access to it? Or even blocking actions to access it in the future? Rather than letting people create or use their own wallets?
A: The thinking is this is the smoothest onboarding experience for web2 users and crypto users outside Algorand. Actually over 50% of our users are outside Algorand already, a percentage that we think will go to 80–90% as we target cross chain traders. There is no risk to customers as neither we nor Magic Link has access to the wallet’s private keys. The Magic Link architecture delegates critical operations to Amazon AWS Key Management Service bypassing the Magic Link back end.
You can find more about this here : https://magic.link/docs/home/security
Q: Your code has been audited twice, once in 2021 by Coinspect and once last year by Vantage Point (though the PDF I downloaded only shows the 1st page, the rest are blank). Is there any advice to give about the process to another startup or project that might be looking to have their code audited as well? How do you find an auditor, what do you look for, how do you prepare yourself for the audit, roughly how much do they cost, etc. Would be super helpful.
A: The PDFs are fully visible — try again ! Latest one is on Vantage GitHub as well — check our Medium for details. The costs are anywhere from substantial to astronomical and unfortunately projects have to factor this cost in. Prices are based on lines of code and can be as low as 10K for a tiny codebase going to hundreds of thousands for a complex project. My advice is to speak with multiple providers, get quotes and negotiate ! DM me if you need intros.
Q: You offer “prediction markets’’, including on anything from token prices to boxing results and to whether Donald J Trump will become the Republican president in 2024. Whether someone gets their prediction right or not, your customers are relying on you to act honestly when informing the smart contracts about the results of whatever was predicted upon. I.e., the Oracle problem. If something were to go wrong here, either due to malice (the “disgruntled employee”) or due to some kind of error, customers’ funds could be lost (and vice-versa).Oracles typically deal with this by spreading the data feeds around, relying on multiple providers and taking an average/median. They also have various economic incentives to ensure people stay aligned, including requiring staking and slashing.How have you approached this? And what kind of recourse do customers have if some data point is passed in incorrectly?
A: Due to the lack of any audited live Oracle service on Algorand we have our own in-built oracles that are further checked by 2 independent users that verify the API feed with MFA access. We have discussed this at length with Algorand for well over a year and we have tried to get support to spin out our Oracle service, however there was no interest. We hear there may be some oracles at some point this year and we will integrate when they are live on mainet. Venue One has resolved hundreds of markets the last 2 months without any errors.
Q: How do you plan to improve the interaction with new users and with users outside the crypto space?
A: We have started the design of the protocol by thinking of the end user experience first. While that has meant a longer development time we feel that we have achieved a great level of user friendliness that allows everyday users to interact with the protocol in a natural way without jumping through crypto hoops ! As a general comment, as Web3 matures UI/UX will become much more important.
Q: Will you be available in the US?
A: We are closed to the US for now and we will revisit this once there is better regulatory clarity
Q: With the BUSD legal actions taken against Paxos, are you guys prepared to react to any regulatory action that may come out against Circle-USDC/Tether-USDT/etc?
A: We use exclusively USDC as collateral as we think it’s the best managed and most regulatory compliant stablecoin. We will add USDT capability soon as well. Any path we take will depend on what the action is and how impactful it will be to the stablecoin peg and the ability of users to transact freely. However, let’s just say that without USDC & USDT we might as well forget to a very large extent the crypto landscape as it stands now..
Q: Is there any data on how information-efficient the market is, e.g. are the odds approaching those of the large centralized betting providers?
A: In centralised venues, traders are price takers, taking fixed odds against a central counterparty that sets the prices based on statistics and their trading inventory risk. In that sense they are mostly close to efficient but not always. In our case the prices are determined from the participants only — as such they may deviate from centralised operators but are going to be more information efficient assuming a good enough number of thoughtful traders.
Q: Will there be an analytics dashboard (of which bidders are performing how well)? I guess with higher liquidity it would also be interesting for some to copy bets from others and will there be a referral option? Some other big DeFi platforms have become big this way.
A: Yes there will be a (privacy protecting) leaderboard that traders can opt in and also a free to play area where the leaderboard will be central. We are also planning to have a referral scheme and we are working on something that is going to help user acquisition but at the same time avoiding users that just want to game the referral system.
Q: As far as I can see, you guys are actually more on the B2B side. What prompted you to work on your own platform that was not developed for a customer and is also primarily not aimed at companies and what is your experience with it?
A: We have worked on a B2C neobank in Hong Kong (https://www.neatcommerce.com) that was recently acquired. Mentat has recently moved away from a pure B2B software development agency to a fintech venture studio and Venue One is our first fully incubated startup.
Q: Are you developing your own Oracle, or will you partner with Goracle or another data provider?
A: We had to as nothing was (and still is not) available. We will look to integrate with all ecosystem projects that are solid.
Q: What differentiates you from established prediction apps like cindicator?
A: We are a fully non custodial exchange — not a centralised polling system/asset manager like cindicator.
Venue One’s mission is to create the best global decentralized prediction market, using the fast Algorand blockchain as our core engine
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