Introducing Venue One

We are very excited to present to you Venue One, a new global, fast and intuitive non-custodial prediction protocol built on the Algorand blockchain.

With the strong support of Algorand, the Algorand Foundation and Borderless Capital we are aiming to build the best prediction markets experience available to the wider crypto and traditional trader community and introduce the $VENO multi-utility token which will power our trading protocol. Designed to be inclusive and fair it will provide outstanding rewards to players and liquidity providers while engaging our community.

Introduction

“There is only one side of the market and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side.”
Jesse Livermore

The timeless quote above applies not only to financial markets but any type of event or series of events that participants are willing to have a financial commitment. Monetizing these views, be it in finance, sports or any other type of event is facilitated by trading venues. The trading that takes place to enable fair and efficient price discovery is at the core of global capital markets and finance. In a wider context, prediction markets as trading venues encompass a larger set of underlying markets than traditional exchanges.

Current landscape

Currently available prediction markets in the crypto space remain exactly that: crypto focused. Plagued by slow execution of orders, insane transaction fees, limited choice of markets and a bad user experience overall. They pale in comparison to what is available in the centralized word.

The primary reason for these failures is the choice of technology. Running on Ethereum (or Ethereum scaling solutions at best) they cannot easily overcome the limitations of the protocol. Ethereum, while revolutionary five years ago, is currently extremely slow and expensive to transact on. It is a blockchain network that was never designed for the kind of intense usage it currently has.

Some of the limitations in existing prediction markets :

• High fees #1: It is uneconomic to transfer money in and out from these platforms for small amounts. Spending 50+ USD to make a 100 USD transaction is not reasonable in any universe, even the centralized one.
• High fees #2 : Bots that are meant to provide in most markets better liquidity and help price discovery are used to arbitrage the players, using asymmetric capability on gas fees and information. This practice, although to be expected given the free markets nature of trading venues, is still a “tax” on the players, facilitated by variable and opaque transaction fees.
• Slow finality : A trading venue needs to resolve prices in seconds at worse. When a participant places a trade they need to know at which level they have traded instantly, not in half an hour. On Ethereum we are facing multiple minutes for smart contracts to execute. Scaling solutions help, but adding an extra layer of complexity, never actually fully solves the fundamental technical issues of Layer-1.
• Liquidity Provision: The community aspect of liquidity provision works well in a decentralized world… in theory. Community liquidity provision has intrinsic limits which translate to shallow markets, limited number of choices and most importantly the need for long duration outcome finality in order to attract size markets in the decentralised pools.
• Curation: Many fully decentralised markets have zero curation allowing markets in what could be considered unethical markets. Furthermore, with their unstructured format a lot of users find navigation difficult.
• User Experience: Well it is crypto, who needs a usable UI ? Safari … who uses any browser which is not from Google ? Mobile … I mean as if anyone would care to place a trade while away from their desk. You get the point.

Venue Markets

When we started brainstorming about a new prediction market we started from the user experience. That drove our choice of technology rails and the roadmap for the product. We wanted a decentralized non-custodial solution that actually can work now on Layer-1. Our choice was obvious : Algorand.

Algorand has built the only blockchain that is currently solving the well known “trilemma problem”: security, scalability and decentralization. What the Ethereum ecosystem hopes to achieve with ETH2 someday, is currently live and running with over 4000 nodes, sub five second finality time and proven capability for thousands of transactions per second (see here: https://metrics.algorand.org). All that plus smart contract capability, something that some very large cap chains still do not have. With this and most importantly very low fixed transaction costs that create a level playing field, we can power an amazing decentralized trading venue.

The Algorand technology will allow us to build the best user experience in distributed prediction markets with no compromises.

Some highlights of what we are planning to build for the players :

• Short duration markets in finance, esports, sports and events
• Binary & Index markets
• An intuitive user interface, designed for mobile from day one
• USDC & USDT for collateral and payouts. Say goodbye to crazy on/off ramp fees
• VCPI technology for Long/Short markets (more on that on a future post)
• An engaging product that has fresh and unique opportunities to trade on a daily basis on global markets
• Fiat and $ALGO onramp for users that do not hold USDC/USDT stablecoins
• Non Custodial : Your wallet, your private keys, your freedom. We never touch your money, it only interacts with the protocol smart contracts which will be fully audited by an independent third party
• Personalisation: Our team has substantial experience in AI that will be utilised to create a fully personalised user journey for our participants. From creating personalised home pages to making smart portfolio analytics usable, the possibilities are endless.
• $VENO rewards FTW !

In terms of the community liquidity providers we aim to :

• Provide category leading income
• Have a wide choice of markets and risk/return profiles
• Create risk mitigation procedures via optimal risk tranching of the balance sheet pool (more on that on a future post)
• $VENO rewards

Team

The team building Venue One has a long track record in finance and technology. George has a solid track record in AI, crypto and quantitative finance. Thanos, Dimitris & Vaggelis have built numerous products that are live and serving millions of web and mobile users. We aim to leverage our collective experience, knowledge and passion about trading and prediction markets to create a category leading product. The Venue One vision is to build a novel decentralized product for everyone globally, not just the crypto community.

Stay Tuned

In the coming weeks we will be releasing our litepaper and further details on our roadmap, team and partnerships. We want to thank the early community of backers, advisors, supporters and followers for their interest in Venue One.

This is just the beginning !

Join our global community Telegram : https://t.me/venuemarkets

Follow us on Twitter : @VenueMarkets

For more information and the $VENO whitelist go to : venue.one