Despite the concept of a DAO has been considered a joke in the past because of the 2016 debacle, its potential is still alive and marching forward. That’s the premise upon which a new decentralized platform for prediction markets is being launched.

Built on Ethereum, Gnosis enables the creation and customization of any prediction market using crowdsourced wisdom from individuals across the world.

Too many things at once

“Generally speaking, ‘The DAO’ was an early implementation of a DAO which tried to break too many things at once, was rushed, and written poorly,” says its Chief Strategist, Matt Liston via email:

“Future DAO structures will be more careful and will exist in a more mature Ethereum ecosystem. This ecosystem will include greater security, more liquidity and more educated users.”

Unlike traditional polling, the platform seeks to collect information by financially incentivizing good information and disincentivizing bad information. It differs from standard polling which asks what participants want to happen rather than prediction markets that ask what participants expect will happen.

By creating efficient markets for forecasting, it aggregates all information sources optimally and creates data layers for probabilities, giving each future outcome a quantified probability of occurring. This data feed can be used for any third-party application and can power Artificial Intelligence.

On why he thinks Gnosis, is the first project founded within Blockchain venture studio ConsenSys, will work out well based on the business model, Liston explains:

“Gnosis is building a suite of DAO governance tools based on Futarchy, which is prediction markets used for governance decisions. We believe that for many decisions, this will work more effectively than voting because it will aggregate good information more directly, from anyone, with value at stake. In terms of our own DAO, we will implement it in stages. We believe that moving carefully, and with adequate testing and research, is appropriate at this stage.”

The advisory board includes Ethereum founders Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Lubin.

Its token auction starts on Monday, April 24 on platforms such as Kraken which has announced that its clients can participate directly from their Kraken accounts. The token price is determined by how long it takes for $12.5 mln in Ether to be sent to the Gnosis sale contract. The longer this takes, the lower the price-per-token will be. At the end of the sale, everyone receives tokens at the lowest price a token is sold for.