Crypto space is exploding. The year 2017 will be remembered as the year when the blockchain technology starting taking off. More than $3 billion were raised in ICOs in 2017 alone surpassing the amount of early stage venture funding. Bitcoin, the first digital currency has crossed the psychological barrier of $10,000 per unit and has a market cap of $260 billion dollars — almost triple than that of Goldman Sachs. The total market cap of all cryptos has risen from $18 billion USD at the beginning of 2017 to over $600 billion USD at the end. Clearly, cryptocurrencies are going mainstream but the ecosystem is severely underdeveloped. Two of the major problems faced by today’s crypto citizens are:
1) Non existence of futures markets for cryptos (except bitcoin) and 2) Absence of reliable information sources to learn about the developments in the space.
Picolo solves these two problems at the same time by providing users with a betting platform. Bets placed on the platform serve as futures for an underlying crypto as well as paint a picture of the current beliefs of a large number of users about a crypto. Since bets are not free to place, information gleaned from them is of exceptionally high quality. All bets on Picolo can be placed with a single platform token eliminating the need to hold multiple cryptos. Picolo allows users to: 1) Place different bets in terms of amount, price and time with different users where the bettor solely controls all aspects of the bet. Contrast this to a traditional futures market where pricing is central and you have no control. As an example: When bitcoin is trading at $15000 you can bet 100 tokens that it will fall to $14000. With another user, you can bet 50 tokens that it will fall to $13500 2) Hedge risk. Example — you own bitcoin and are bullish on long term but bearish on the short term. You can take a bet against it on the short term and profit if the price indeed goes down. If the price goes up, you will lose the bet but since you are long on the actual underlying you might still profit. This is very similar to futures trading. 3) See all the bets live on the platform to gain insight into the current and future market state 4) Create games in an effort gather information or sentiment about an event. Events can range from presidential elections to whether a certain topic will appear in a college test.
There are a number of other exciting features we envision for Picolo. See them in the whitepaper at https://picolo.ai/Whitepaper.pdf. If you are technically oriented, check out our thought process towards initial implementation in the technical paper at https://picolo.ai/paper.pdf.
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