Catnip Exchange Makes Prediction Markets Usable

Catnip Exchange is a simpler and lower-fee prediction market experience built on top of Augur and Balancer. A project by AugurDAO, a decentralized collective that aims to progress the use of open prediction markets. As a result, Catnip’s mission is to remove the friction that makes prediction markets too complicated for users.

High liquidity and low tx fees

The team uses foundry.finance to tokenize outcome shares in Augur markets, then deposits them in a Balancer pool. Essentially, they wrap it all up in their custom UI which enables you to place a prediction in the same fluid way of making a token swap. The result is transaction fees that are up to 10x lower than using Augur’s native UI and ~50% lower than on Balancer’s UI. Furthermore, there are zero settlement fees and half the swap fees found in competitors such as Omen or Polymarket.

Simplicity… Catnip follows a similar UI to Uniswap which is a familiar sight to any DeFi user. It takes just two clicks to make a trade. At the moment, there is only one market, the 2020 U.S. presidential election. However, interest is growing fast with over $300k in liquidity in the market’s balancer pool.

  • Currently, if you have never used MetaMask or Ethereum, things are a bit more complicated. However, the team states they are working hard to improve it.

No Limits… Much like using any Augur market, there are no limits to how much you can trade on Catnip. Centralized prediction markets such as PredictIt will limit you to 850 USD per outcome. Furthermore, trading via Catnip Exchange is non-custodial along with decentralized market resolution via Augur. Decentralized betting just got accessible and interesting!