Here are guides for several participation options:

Gnosis LightWallet (Default recommended option, can be funded with any Ether source including Shapeshift)

Kraken (Participate directly from Kraken and have tokens credited to your account)

MyEtherWallet (Light wallet commonly used for other token sales)

Ethereum-Wallet / Mist (Full node Ethereum wallet maintained by the Ethereum Foundation)

Parity (Alternative full node wallet with technical features)

imToken (中文, Mobile wallet targeting the Chinese market)

Auction Mechanism:

Basic details of the token auction can be found here.

Our sale terms can be found here.

We are also available on Slack for additional questions.

We’re looking forward to taking the next leap in the Gnosis project tomorrow!

Best,

The Gnosis Team

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

GNO tokens are functional utility tokens within the Gnosis platform. GNO tokens are not securities. GNO tokens are non-refundable. GNO tokens are not for speculative investment. No promises of future performance or value are or will be made with respect to GNO, including no promise of inherent value, no promise of continuing payments, and no guarantee that GNO will hold any particular value. GNO tokens are not participation in the Company and GNO tokens hold no rights in said company. GNO tokens are sold as a functional good and all proceeds received by Company may be spent freely by Company absent any conditions. GNO tokens are intended for experts in dealing with cryptographic tokens and blockchain-based software systems.

It’s finally time! The Gnosis token sale is beginning today, April 24th, at 1pm EST. was originally published in GnosisDAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What is a DAO?

A DAO, or Decentralized Autonomous Organization, is an organization which lives, breathes, and thinks on a blockchain through smart contracts. A DAO can issue tokens which allow for group governance and incentive compatibility, pay contractors or employees (human or otherwise), and make decisions using governance protocols or internal logic. Ultimately, a DAO is a framework allowing for updated corporate, non-profit, state, or other organizations, which are partially or fully automated and allow for new forms of collaboration and decision making.

What innovations and advantages can DAOs bring over existing organizational structures?

Incentives: In a corporation, shares have limited access (private company, accredited investors,…). Toward some goals, this is sufficient, however new business models will require large groups of collaborators to be incentivized to work together. A DAO enables such massively collaborative structures. This can be accomplished by issuing tokens on a public blockchain, drastically lowering the barrier to entry to acquire tokens, and allowing for large groups of aligned token holders with arbitrarily small quantities of tokens. Additionally, it is much faster and more efficient to transfer these tokens, allowing for small and short term holdings.

Decisions: In a corporation, decisions are largely limited to board members and corporate executives. This limits both the quantity and frequency with which decisions can be made, and also the diversity of information which can guide these decisions. In a DAO structure, decisions can be made through information from any group imaginable, with much more configuration flexibility. For example, a DAO can be configured such that all token holders can vote on decisions ranging from how to spend funds, who to hire, or even much smaller decisions. These votes can be set up in nearly any way. They can be set up by weight, through ranged or ranked voting, one vote per token holder, and other possible configurations. Additionally, alternative processes, such as Futarchy where markets inform decisions, can be utilized. This flexibility and open participation will bring more information required to make better decisions, as well as more flexibility in what can be decided via collaborative processes.

Collaborators: As mentioned, DAO tokens can be held by an incredibly wide range of participants. This means that new roles, especially those that are small and temporary, can be enabled. Additionally, the speed and efficiency of blockchain payments make contracting small tasks much easier. In a DAO, the difference between a CEO and a mechanical turk-like task contributor is much more fluid, and both can be properly incentivized to work toward the best interests of the DAO.

Processes: In existing organizational models, financial, legal, and decision transactions can be slow and costly. Payments require slow wire transfers, legal work involves extensive paper contracts and sometimes lengthy litigation or arbitration, and decisions require manual documentation, paperwork, and protocols. DAOs have the capacity to greatly simplify these processes, by recording everything onto the blockchain, and automating nearly everything with smart contracts. Now, payments as small or large as necessary can be made almost instantly and with extremely low fees. Legal processes can largely be brought into the smart contract realm as well, with more traditional arbitrators as signers along the process. Decisions can be made through chain voting protocols and be automatically implemented. To put it simply, a DAO is always on and with very little friction.

Look for upcoming posts detailing DAO examples, and what Gnosis is contributing to this ecosystem!

What is DAO May Never Die: The DAO, DAOs, and the Future of Organization was originally published in GnosisDAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Prediction markets, which are fundamentally tools for aggregating the best and most unbiased information possible, provide several direct and indirect solutions to these problems.

One core stumbling block of the current democratic system is an inability for voters and legislature to accurately measure the effect that a given policy will have. For example, a repeal of the Affordable Care Act has garnered popular support among a large group of voters who would likely face losing or paying more for healthcare if the policy were passed. Where could these citizens have gotten the vital information necessary to avoid such self-harming decision making? Politicians are spouting hyperbolic statements and baseless predictions. Mainstream media outlets profit off of sensationalist journalism, detached from realistic outcome probabilities, and driven by group think. Meanwhile, it’s nearly impossible to sift out the truth from alternative news sources. There is simply no quantifiable, accessible, and unbiased source of truthful information pertaining to the effects of policy decisions. This is precisely where prediction markets can help. In existing models of fact dissemination, actors typically have limited negative impact from spreading false forecasts. With a prediction market, spreading falsehoods will result in a financial loss whereas providing accurate information will result in gains.

Sifting Through News

A basic prediction market follows the form, “will this event occur?” These markets can be helpful to inform of the likelihood that an event will happen, which can help readers sift through sensationalist journalism. Take for example a media outlet which is reporting a high likelihood that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. This news gets clicks by rising fears, however as it turned out the likelihood of Iraq having such weapons was low. A prediction market of the form, “Does Iraq possess weapons of mass destruction?” would have been helpful to guide readers, temper irrational concerns, and decrease support of foreign policy hawkishness. By informing the public in this way, prediction markets can steer public opinion away from fear driven policies and toward quantifiable, factual, information.

Estimating Policy Effect

Prediction markets can be extended beyond their basic form into markets which are combinations of events, called conditional (or multidimensional) markets. These markets ask questions of the form, “If A happens, will B happen?” or “If A happens, what will the change in B be?” Such markets can provide an indispensable tool toward informing of the effect of policies or other decisions. Let’s go back to health care as an example. As it stands, public sentiment supporting ACA repeal is largely driven by viral falsehoods, loud figureheads, and filter bubbles. There is no clear and unbiased warning sign informing these supporters that such a policy decision could have significant negative impacts on their livelihood. In this case, we can make markets that show the public exactly that. Take a market which asks, “If the ACA is repealed, what will the change in number of American’s insured in 1 year be?” This market would aggregate the best possible estimate of this outcome in a quantifiable and unbiased fashion. Markets such as these can provide a clear and continuously updating source of truth for the public.

Governance

Futarchy is a proposed form of governance which uses prediction markets to automate decision making. With Futarchy, instead of asking legislature to make policy decisions, the market is asked. For example, a government may want to decide whether or not to spend $2 billion on an infrastructure project. The government’s imperative for funding such a project is ultimately raising GDP. Ideally, members of the legislature would become experts on this topic and vote in an informed and unbiased member. Realistically, this is unlikely to be the case. In the case of Futarchy, the government would create two markets: the first asks, “If we fund this project, what will our GDP be in 2 years?” and the other asks, “If we do not fund this project, what will our GDP be in 2 years?” Following a trading period, where participants are financially incentivized to provide the most accurate information available, the market with the greater estimated outcome automatically becomes the chosen policy. Those who had purchased shared in the losing market would have all of their funds returned. Those who participated in the winning market will receive a gain or loss, depending on the accuracy of their predictions, after the 2 year period has elapsed.

This mechanism fills the requirements outlined, both solving informational inefficiencies, and retaining democracy’s egalitarian properties. In the Futarchy case, voters can still have equal say. Independent of the Futarchy decision making, the government would hold a voting process. For example, the government could ask its citizens to rank their priorities of what they want from their government. One voter could rank GDP first, education level second, and healthcare coverage third, and another voter could rank differently. All of these rankings would be compiled into a vector which represents the priorities that the government is required to optimize for. Now, each Futarchy market will optimize for that vector. In this way, voters are still fully represented by the government in an egalitarian fashion, and informational inefficiencies are eliminated by the market. Futarchy on a federal government level seems like a moonshot. However, in the rapidly evolving blockchain ecosystem, it can be tested today. We are committed to being at the forefront of those efforts.

How Prediction Markets Can Save Democracy From Itself was originally published in GnosisDAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Gnosis is the first decentralized prediction market. All financial logic operates on the Ethereum public network. There are no central intermediaries holding funds or calculating pricing. Shares in markets are held directly by a user’s personal wallet and are also directly redeemed to their wallet.

So why do we make such an effort to decentralize?

Counterparty Risk

Typically to participate in a prediction market, or another similar market, a user sends some amount of currency to the site operator (Intrade, Betfair, Poloniex). These funds are then held by a wallet owned by the site operator, and the equivalent value is credited to the user’s account via a database entry. This process places risk upon both the site operator and the user. The site operator must now hold and be responsible for securing customer funds. If a hack or other hazard occurs, the site is responsible and may be sued. On the other hand, the user needs to trust that several events will not happen, including theft by the site or from the site, legal intervention, and payment processors restricting withdrawal capacity. These are significant considerations, especially taking into account that these issues have occurred with regularity. From a market perspective, this means decreased liquidity as users factor in the risk of fund loss.

Gnosis, through decentralization and automation of fund holdings and share issuance, provides a solution to these hazards. Unused funds always reside in the user’s control. Users own the account and hold the private keys. No one else can move their funds, and they are able to move their funds even if Gnosis goes down. Funds which have already been used to purchase shares in markets are held in automated smart contracts, which are incorruptible by humans, and designed to verifiably pay out correct values upon event resolution. Our model removes the burden from the site operator (in our case, the Gnosis DApp or apps building on top), and removes the user’s exposure to counterparty risk. This decreased risk and increased confidence will result in greater market liquidity.

Access

One of the most severe impediments to widespread prediction market adoption is access limitations. Laws regulating prediction market usage and operation are often unclear, and vary wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. This results in unique applications for each location, which siloes liquidity. Many locations have no access at all.

By decentralizing, Gnosis has the ability to be location agnostic. Gnosis can be accessed anywhere. Furthermore, anyone accessing Gnosis, regardless of location, has access to the same markets, pricing, and liquidity that anyone in any other location would have. This results not only in increased adoption capacity, but also in greater information aggregation. For example, take a market on the weather in China. Researchers in the UK may have an excellent weather model, and access to a prediction market to sell their information, however that market would likely only be accessible in the UK. On the other side of the world, locals in the region may have more fine grained current or historical weather data. With Gnosis, both groups can access the same markets, adding more unique information to the markets and thus resulting in better probability estimates and pricing.

Coordination

Gnosis is built as a platform, and as such, its success is partially dependent on other parties building applications on top. In order to ensure this occurs, trust issues must be tackled. The first can be categorized as platform to application trust. In this case, an application wants to build on an existing platform, however there is risk that the platform may change usage rules. For example, an application building on Facebook may be wholly dependent on Facebook continuing to share a certain data parameter. If Facebook changes its policy, which it could on a whim, that application operator would be out of business. To solve this problem, applications need guarantees at the platform level that usage properties will remain the same (or predictable). With a decentralized, smart contract platform we do exactly that. Platform rules are hard coded into the software and are publicly viewable and verifiable. Additionally, high level operation changes could potentially include a decentralized governance layer, adding transparency and fairness for all participants. The second trust issue is application-to-application, where the two applications may be competing. By enabling a global and universally accessible liquidity pool, we provide a compelling argument for competitors to each operate on Gnosis. Added liquidity results in more accurate pricing, which is a primary value add for users.

The Case for Decentralization was originally published in GnosisDAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Our first experiment will begin in the next few weeks and will test manipulators ability to push a market which will verifiably resolve to 5 above this value. These initial experiments will gauge how easy (or hard) it is for a group of participants with special interests (in this case the manipulation token holders) to manipulate a market in order to sway the decision of an oracle. There are two primary cases in which such manipulation may be used: futarchy markets (or other processes) for organization decision, and oracle processes which involve markets to determine oracle outcome. In each case, groups may have a direct monetary incentive to change market outcomes.

This experiment will consist of three components:

1. 10,000 manipulation shares will be auctioned in 1,000 share chunks over a 3 day period.
2. A smart contract coded to return 5. This will be used to resolve the market.
3. A scalar market with the range (0,10) which will run for one week.

We will begin with the auction of 10,000 manipulation shares. These shares will be sold in 1,000 share chunks. Following the markets closure, these shares will be redeemable for between 0 and 0.1 Eth depending upon the average value of the prediction market shares. This redemption value will be calculated by ((avg market value) — 5)/50. For example, if the market price remains at 5 for the entire period these shares will redeem for 0 and if the market remains at 10 for the entire period, they will redeem for 0.1. Redemption value will be calculated proportionally between these prices. At this time we will also submit the resolution contract for review.

Three days following this, we will launch the market on Gnosis. This will be a scalar market with a range of (0,10). This market will be resolved by the contract which will verifiably return 5. Everyone is open and encouraged to participate in this market. Whenever the market value is above 5 there is a guaranteed profit opportunity for users who have not purchased manipulation shares. Following market resolution, manipulation shares will be redeemable calculated by the average value over the market’s duration.

Expect a post here in the next few weeks announcing experiment dates, and please visit our forum at http://forum.groupgnosis.com/ for more discussion!

TL;DR:

• Gnosis Prediction Market experiments testing market manipulation and Futarchy, funded by Ethereum DEV grant
• First experiment, market resolves to 5, manipulators push market above 5 for profit. Other users profit by pushing back to 5.
• Begins in the next few weeks