Ingamar told us about DXdao and where is Omen prediction market platform stands in decentralization spectrum.
Hello! What’s your background, and what are you working on?
Hi. My name is Ingamar Ramirez and I am a content creator, marketer, and DAOist in the blockchain space. I was a digital marketing consultant for a couple of years before I started reading about bitcoin and ethereum as a hobby. I attended a Meetup event in Tribeca, NYC, and it was then that I learned about Bitcoin from a political perspective and decided, “Ok, I am down for the movement.” A few meetups later, I was referred to a startup called Celsius Network where I learned a lot about fundraising, business development, influencer and product marketing.
After my time at Celsius, I hosted two seasons of Top of the Block podcast and continued to consult projects with the knowledge and relationships I had gained. In 2020, I decided to teach myself about DeFi by writing about it. Thanks to my friends at dOrg, a dev agency DAO working on DeFi products, I was introduced to the DXdao to write about their continuous fundraising campaign called OpenRaise. Since then, I have been cutting out marketing strategies, creating content, and leading business development meetings to advance the efforts of the DXdao and their products.
DXdao has been producing at a wildly fast pace, with two live products they are actively governing and/or developing for. A lot of my attention has been on Omen, a decentralized prediction market application that lets you create a prediction market in a matter of minutes. It boasts a simple and intuitive interface for creating and staking in markets, with a very dedicated community behind it and Kleros Court as an arbitration platform. The powerful thing about prediction markets is that people are rewarded for reporting truthful information. Regardless of the sides of any debate, the prediction market forces acknowledgement of a clear consensus. Decentralizing the process allows it to be automated, permissionless, and more efficient than they would otherwise.
Creating content and messaging that explains all of these products and builds the brand of the DAO is a challenge, as everyone here are self-starters. No single person is calling the shots, which means that anyone can jump in with ideas and get to work on them. While the DXdao moves forward as a collective, it’s great to ask, “What do you think of this as the next content piece?” in a group chat, and pool our concepts together so that we can keep our efforts collaborative.
What’s Omen backstory?
Stefan George of Gnosis gave a talk at Ethereum Community Conference this year that explained why prediction markets have not quite taken off yet within the blockchain space. His thesis was that it was not because of lack of usability or number of interesting markets; it was liquidity. Gas costs were absurdly high, and market making was time-consuming and costly. Many markets focus on factors that exist outside of order books, so it is difficult as well to conduct trading strategies that apply to all markets.
Thus Omen entered development, with the concept of having a Uniswap-like automated market maker to allow traders to trade frictionlessly within each prediction market. Markets are resolved by Realit.io and arbitrated by Kleros.io. A development shop named Protofire developed the first version of Omen under a GECO grant. The DXdao has been carrying this work forward.
What’s your business model?
The business model for Omen involves fees for trading outcome tokens within a prediction market. While at the moment, fees are directed towards liquidity providers, in the future there may be a frontend fee directed towards the DXtrust, allowing for 10% of revenues to be retained as liquidity for the curve, while 90% would go directly towards the DXdao treasury. The DXdao intends to establish an active and loyal community before incorporating a revenue structure.
Perhaps our most noteworthy prediction market is Will Ethereum 2.0 Phase 0 launch before 2021? at over $140,000 in trading volume. It got some decent buzz on Twitter, where even Ethereum core developers chimed in. That was one of the visions the DAO had, in supplementing open discourse on social media with a way for people to back their statements by staking on Omen.
There are a couple of competitors out there, such as Poly Market and Augur. We believe we have an edge due to Omen’s swift onboarding process through Metamask and Wallet Connect. Markets are very easy to create, and thus far Omen is doing well in terms of liquidity and activity.
What’s your position on the regulatory landscape today?
DXdao is taking the far end of the decentralization spectrum. It is global, pseudonymous, permissionless, and unstoppable. There are no shareholders, or CEO. It is an amorphous community building cool stuff. With that said, DXdao makes sure to warn users and members that they must do their own research and participate at their own risk.
What are your goals for the future?
There are discussions in the DXdao community about delegating aspects of Omen governance to a community completely focused on Omen. This could include curating Omen markets as well as synthesizing product requirements. The DXdao is operating as a massive community of members hopping around from initiative to initiative. If there could be multiple “departments” focused on specific objectives, I think the DXdao could work much more transparently and in a more organized way. For now I’m proud of the progress it has made, but the DXdao is a continuously evolving organization. It is quite beautiful to observe and be a part of.
What are your future thoughts for the DeFi market?
DeFi is here to stay. While some may say it is accelerating at too quick of a pace, that just comes with the disruptive nature of blockchain. There is risk and reward, many times under extreme measures. This is something that anyone who uses money or the internet should be aware of, whether they participate or not. I think it’s great that more volume is hopping over from the more centralized products. People are catching on, and it’s great timing for the DXdao. I hope that this organization makes some long-standing contributions to DeFi, and becomes the leading example for DAOs that want to go a similar path.
