Blog:
Introducing IMOO: Information Market On-chain Oracle
We are pleased to announce IMOO: an on-chain oracle that provides information markets with a global, real-time opinion poll to expedite settlement of a market. IMOO is designed to arbitrate markets, while offering them the information required to enter into more diverse types of prediction.
An information market, sometimes called a prediction market, is a system that allows an individual, or organization, to trade on the outcome of an event. The market matches a buyer and seller of a certain prediction.
For instance, a market could be made on the prediction of an actual event, such as the laws passed in the Glasgow Climate Change Conference. It could, however, be based on equally binary, yet abstract, events such as the price of Bitcoin.
The statement in the market could be “the price of Bitcoin will pass 70k by the end of the week” and a buyer of that position “buys” that outcome, while a seller “sells” that outcome, indicating they do not believe it will happen. Because prediction markets are crowd-sourced, they are often thought to act as a good indicator on the outcome of an event.
Information markets can be created for any event that people wish to trade on.
“IMOO represents one more application of HUMAN tech. Access to global pools of respondents brings many use cases; microwork can be a task done, like data labeling, or for an opinion given, as in IMOO. The accuracy of consensus is a function of the quantity of respondents. HUMAN achieves that quantity by accessing global pools in a CAPTCHA-style API.” - Alex Newman, Protocol Designer.
IMOO stands for the Information Market On-chain Oracle. It feeds information markets with a crowd-sourced opinion poll to help determine the result of a market, and therefore expedite its settlement. To learn more, visit the IMOO webpage.
When an event has passed, but the outcome is unclear, information markets must find a way to determine the outcome of the result. Often these events are ‘unrefereed’, such as the US presidential election, which took days to gauge the winner, and weeks to finalize the outcome.
Such events require the information markets to gather their own sources of information. Some markets will be quicker to determine the outcome than others, which exposes the markets to arbitration. If one market pays out for “Biden win”, while another market is still open, someone could interpret that “Biden win” payout as a sure sign of the result, and buy a corresponding position in a market which is yet to be settled.
IMOO enables anyone offering prediction markets to ask millions a single question. If 8/10 people are, in real-time, answering that “Biden won”, that is valuable information to the market, and could help expedite settlement to protect the market from arbitration. In a world where seconds are the difference between a market being exposed or not, any information that can help determine the outcome of an event is valuable.
There are many centralized information markets. There is, however, a growing demand for decentralized information markets to expand the scope and capabilities of the markets by allowing anyone, anywhere to partake in them, and to create any kind of market they wish.
Decentralized tools are required to create decentralized information markets. Until IMOO, there has been no decentralized sources of information which could be used to converge these markets. HUMAN’s unique ability to sample from millions of global respondents enables this, and unlocks a new scope of DeFi capabilities for Layer-1 chains.
IMOO is another example of crowdsourcing HUMAN intuition; managing, collating, and rewarding a disparate group of millions of respondents for their valuable knowledge. IMOO, too, indicates a further expansion of the knowledge worker: no longer is it limited to what you know, but even to what you believe. An individual opinion, when placed in the context of many, becomes a valuable barometer of event outcomes.
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Legal Disclaimer
The HUMAN Protocol Foundation makes no representation, warranty, or undertaking, express or implied, as to the accuracy, reliability, completeness, or reasonableness of the information contained here. Any assumptions, opinions, and estimations expressed constitute the HUMAN Protocol Foundation’s judgment as of the time of publishing and are subject to change without notice. Any projection contained within the information presented here is based on a number of assumptions, and there can be no guarantee that any projected outcomes will be achieved.
