The core of Zeitgeist is a prediction market platform based on Substrate, to understand its characteristics, team and token distribution.
Written by: Groot
The 2020 U.S. election, with the highest number of voters in nearly a century, is undoubtedly the most eye-catching “risk event” in the global financial market in the second half of last year, and this election is regarded by the media as one of the most unpredictable elections in history. And such a very suspenseful but highly popular focus event has just become an opportunity for the previously tepid prediction market track to erupt. The prediction market products launched by Augur, Polymarket, Catnip and even the centralized platform FTX ushered in explosive growth in traffic before and after the election.
The prediction market is an open market for trading “assets” linked to the potential outcome of future events. Another key value manifestation of the prediction market is that it can summarize the judgments of all participants in the market to create a signal tool that predicts the probability of an event. Therefore, the value and imagination of the prediction market should not be simply limited to the binary or multivariate prediction game launched by most of the current track products. Zeitgeist , which aims to build the Web3 prediction market hub and ecosystem, has made some new ideas. try.
What is Zeitgeist?
Zeitgeist is a new blockchain for the prediction market and the government management model Futarchy proposed by economist Robin Hanson to make decisions through the prediction market. Zeitgeist was built specifically for the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems and conceived itself as the hub and ecosystem of the Web3 prediction market.
The core of Zeitgeist is an open prediction market platform, which is built based on Polkadot’s blockchain framework, Substrate. Zeitgeist aims to be deployed as a parachain of Kusama in the second half of 2021, so as to enjoy cross-chain interoperability with all parachains and applications in the Kusama and Polkadot ecosystems. The team stated that there is currently no plan for parallel deployment on Polkadot, but the voice of the community in the future will still be the key to evaluating this possibility.
Zeitgeist has made further innovations and optimizations on the basis of the existing decentralized prediction market products, such as the implementation of the prediction market including classified Categorical, scalar Scalar and combined Combinatorial, and liquidity-sensitive logarithmic market scoring rules (LS-LMSR) Innovations in trading mechanisms such as Automatic Market Makers (AMM), etc.
However, what Zeitgeist wants to do is not just a prediction market platform, but to build a complete ecosystem for the prediction market track. Zeitgeist’s underlying protocol can continue to evolve with the contributions of communities and users, and is currently working to create a community so that every participant can have the right to speak, researchers can propose new ideas, and traders can discuss and issue creations. For the new prediction market proposal, developers can build on the basis of an open protocol, and they can also deploy applications based on the prediction market very freely.
The concept of the government management model “Futarchy” mentioned above will also penetrate into the main governance mechanism of Zeitgeist’s underlying blockchain to create an example of using this experimental governance system in a real economic environment.
On March 26, Zeitgeist announced the completion of a seed round of 1.5 million US dollars. The investors are D1 Ventures, Genblock Capital, AU21 Capital, Digital Renaissance Foundation, A195 Capital, Four Seasons Ventures, Brilliance Ventures, BlockSync Ventures, and Acala. And a member of the Web3 Foundation.
Zeitgeist’s team
The core team of Zeitgeist has extensive experience in the blockchain industry and the prediction market track. Two members of the team have worked in the Web3 Foundation for two years, and have witnessed the release timeline of Kusama and Polkadot throughout the process, and have special insights into Polkadot. The third member has been working in the prediction market for more than 15 years.
Logan Saether is a technical expert with a background in engineering projects in the Ethereum and Polkadot ecosystems. While working at the Web3 Foundation, Logan assisted in the creation of key tools and operations around the release of Kusama and Polkadot, and wrote a large number of documents on Polkadot, including major contributions to Polkadot wiki entries. He also helped establish and manage the thousand-person verification program for the two blockchain networks mentioned above. This is a community-centered project aimed at decentralization and expansion of the set of validators for each network.
David Perry has extensive career and experience in prediction market platforms. In 2005, he co-founded Consensus Point, one of the earliest business prediction market software companies. Since then, he has been committed to promoting the adoption of prediction markets by hundreds of corporate organizations, including General Electric, Qualcomm, Best Buy and the U.S. government. For the past five years, he has been working in the blockchain field and has worked for Consensys for three years, focusing on product strategy.
Chris Hutchinson is one of the best community builders in the blockchain industry. He started his blockchain career at Status.im, during which he led the community work during the Ethereum boom from 2017 to 2018. He joined the Web3 Foundation in early 2019 and established the Polkadot Ambassador Program from scratch, which now has more than 1,500 active members from more than 300 cities around the world. In addition, in the past few years, he has led many important marketing and community projects to promote Kusama and Polkadot networks, such as Gitcoin’s Hackusama and the “Hello World” campaign.
Comprehensive understanding of the native token ZTG
Zeitgeist will launch the native token ZTG to incentivize contributors in the ecology. The token is expected to be officially issued in the third quarter of 2021. The token creation circulation will be 100 million, and the annual inflation rate will be maintained at 5%. There is no upper limit for the amount.
ZTG inflation is mainly used to incentivize and maintain the stable operation of the network. Of the 5% of inflation, 1% will be paid to network node operators, 2% will be paid to contributors who provide assistance to Zeitgeist, and the remaining 2% will be paid to KSM lock-up users as lock-up interest.
The main uses of ZTG include, but are not limited to, the base currency for the prediction market in the ecology, on-chain governance and voting rights for a series of decisions in the ecology, incentives for ecological development contributors, and fuel in the ecology. Among them, 80% of the transaction fee will be destroyed, and the remaining 20% will be charged into the treasury, and the treasury will serve as a fund reserve for the future development of the network.
The distribution of the 100 million ZTG issued by Genesis is as follows:
- 7% of seed round sales (20% unlocked initially, and the remaining 80% will be unlocked linearly within 12 months);
- 8% of strategic round sales (20% unlocked initially, and the remaining 80% will be unlocked linearly within 12 months);
- IDO public offering 10% (no lock-up);
- Airdrop 3% (the main target group of strategic airdrop is users of prediction market applications on other chains to expand the initial user volume);
- 2% reserved for community incentives (reserved for community members who provided early assistance to the development of the Zeitgeist project);
- Parachain lease 40% (this part of funds will be retained and used for Kusama parachain lease for the first 6 years after the project goes live);
- 15% of the team and consultants (20% will be unlocked initially, and the remaining 80% will be unlocked linearly within 24 months);
- The foundation reserves 15% (in the future, it can be used to motivate teams and developers who build applications on Zeitgeist).
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