Ethereum Based Prediction Platform Veil Closes Its Door after 6 months from Launch

A crypto-based prediction market and derivatives platform, Veil offered services to its customers for only 6 months and now shutting down its shop.

Veil, prediction platform was introduced in January 2019. The company failed to provide services for a long time due to some reasons and already closing its doors. The news was announced by the Veil through a Medium post.

The veil is a web interface, allows customers to place bets on prediction markets, Augur provides an immediate settlement API to pay on fair outcomes, co-founder of Veil, Paul Fletcher-Hill mentioned in the post.

The platform was developed over Augur. Veil platform aim was to make the service more adaptable, allowing customers to place bets on Angular market. Users could place bets on tennis matches, the Academy Awards, and Oscar nominations. The platform also promised to offer quick and cost-effective trading with instant payments.

In a Medium post, Paul Fletcher-Hill briefed that the trading on the platform will close on July 24^th, and no new markets will be added to its platform from July 11^th, 2019.

One of the important updates is that Veil’s team has considered to ‘sunset’ its product.

The code can be accessed from GitHub, is as an open-source, it is provided to help other developers to use and study the project.

Four months back, Veil revealed at the New York Token Summit that the platform will launch an AugurLite along with the market to place a bet on Presidential election 2020. The initiative was appreciated and received mixed comments during that period. Few said AugurLite is a centralized version of Augur protocol.

The platform is closing for better

The co-founder post explains how hard it was to take this bold decision and continues saying,

The decision was very tough to consider; unfortunately the platform was unable to find a good option between the things we were developing and the current market. The platform believes that the digital currencies and the decentralized system will have a significant impact on the future. But as of now, the user group is very small, and we believe our developer team can develop more effective products and services soon.

No additional markets will be included to the platform, but users can continue participating in online trading over the platform for another two weeks. Trading will be shut on 24^th July, completely.

The post asks users to do the following things:

• Users should redeem their open positions in the market. Users need not pay any charges so they can take exploit it.
• If the user has any holds in the active markets, they should withdraw it. All Veil prediction markets are Augur so they can convert it.
• Users should withdraw their Veil Ether and convert Veil Ether to Ether.

The above things can be performed automatically as the complete asset is non-custodial. Co-founder informs users to do them while the platform is active.    

Reason for Veil’s Failure

Fletcher-Hill has cited the reason why Veil failed in the post, he says because of tough onboarding experience and its inability to reduce the gap between regulation and decentralization. The post reads it’s difficult to provide something that the user finds precious.

He states,

“We tried to do too much. Prediction markets are a generalized form of betting derivatives, insurance, and more. Focused versions of any of these verticals may be better for users than the generalized form.”

Hill Street Labs will retain the development team for its next project.