What happened in the past 9 months:
MVP: We spent the first 4 months developing the first version of our contracts in serpent, the dApp frontend in Angular and the oracle backend in Django.
Refactoring phase, contract rewrites: 3.5 months were spent to make the MVP actually work as a first live product. We had to reimplement the contracts twice and finally ported all code to Solidity, which improved gas costs significantly. The dApp frontend was adapted and many features added. Finally we went live a few days after transactions were allowed during the Frontier release.
LightWallet/Remote-Node: We spent the last month to adapt our platform to use a browser wallet and a remote node. Anyone who owns Ether on any exchange can participate in the markets from now on. We hope to attract a lot more users this way.
What is planned in the next 4-6 months:
Platform for Oracles: Anyone can become an Oracle by providing events and signed outcomes. Oracles earn fees in return. We are cooperating with https://www.realitykeys.com/ to develop a comprehensive API and leverage their events and signed outcomes into our platform. To validate the identities of potential Oracles with a linked third party account (Twitter etc.), we will integrate with Chris’s persona project.
Off-chain markets and order books: To be able to scale to potentially thousands of markets, we have to handle most markets off-chain. We will build a web-service as channel to handle those markets until the ethereum integrated channel is mature. Order-books will be integrated as off-chain order-books from the start. We will implement a webservice to handle the off-chain order books, which are essentially signed messages with an expiry date (block number). Like the oracle service anyone can participate and become market maker by submitting buy and sell orders.
Market makers: We will write a service which leverages events from an external sport market maker (betting site) into our platform and also leverage their orders. It is essentially an external market maker based on an order-book. This allows us to cover all important sport events and offer very competitive orders. In addition we want to implement other types of automated market makers, which can be chosen on market creation.
Crowdfunded Market Makers: Market Makers only have a high return of investment, if there is enough trading on a market. That’s why we want to offer the possibility to do a crowdfunding for funding markets. To reduce the risk for investors, there will be the option to only trade the markets within the investors. This milestone has low priority compared to the upper goals because there is less money to make. We may integrate with Weifund.
BlockApps Integration: We will switch from our remote node to BlockApps and use their statistical tools to calculate revenues and profits for market makers with their API.
Skins: The Gnosis Angular Service will be updated to handle potentially thousands of markets and orders. The HunchGame skin will implement the service and offer special features like hunch decks. Once the HunchGame skin is done, we will start to implement the Sport-Betting skin. All services should be SEO optimized. We build on Milad’s, Bogdan’s and Eva’s creativity, experience and work to create those skins for Gnosis.
Marketing: To increase the popularity of Gnosis skins we will find more channels to advertise our service. We will create a marketing video to spread the word about Gnosis services and get the attention of potential investors in a crowdsale. Jesse will help us with this among many other things.
Business model: We need to find a business model. One possible component is a crowdsale of Gnosis tokens. The tokens would be required to use the Gnosis contracts. A model how the tokens are created, distributed and used/consumed needs to be defined.