An Ethereum-focused prediction market and derivatives platform, Veil is shutting down, as per an official blog post on July 11.
Released way back in July, the Veil web interface enables users to create and bet on Augur prediction markets, providing an instant settlement API to pay out on proper outcomes.
Paul Fletcher-Hill, who is the founder of the startup, declared in a Medium post,
“We believe that cryptocurrencies and the decentralized web will have profound effects on our future. But today the community of users is small, and we think there are higher impact products and services we can build for the immediate future.”
From July 11, no new markets will be added into the exchange. Also, it will turn off the ability to build new predictions market starting from July 12. Trading on the non-custodial platform will be shut down on July 24. On the contrary, the company's code will be available as open-source on GitHub for the developers.
The firm is closing its operation four months after it declared in a New York Token Summit that it would be launching AugurLite fork market to bet on the 2020 presidential elections.
During that time, the company got mixed reviews with some referring to it as a "centralized" version of the prediction-enabling Augur Protocol.
Based on its website, Veil planned to “bring Augur mainstream” and enhance the user experience by improving the transaction speed. Veil also allowed users to trade on the Augur marketplace quickly through the 0x protocol and offered instant settlement by enabling users to sell their shares to Veil before native finalization of Augur transactions on the blockchain.
While talking about the reasons, why Veil wasn't able to complete its goals, Fletcher-Hill described a lot of problems, along with the main reason that the platform is not friendly enough for crypto invoices:
“We didn’t offer a good onboarding experience. Crypto as a user base is still early, and we didn’t make it easy enough for users without crypto or a wallet to get started.”
Some of the other reasons for failure include finding a proper medium between decentralization and regulation. Also, the firm provided a lot of options as a broad-scale prediction market. He said:
“It’s hard to offer something in between that people find valuable. 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.”
Paul Fletcher further suggests the users redeem open positions, withdraw positions from open markets, withdraw veil ether, and convert it to ether.
To carry out any transaction, the firm has removed settlement fees and will conduct 45-minute interviews with users till the end of next month.