Lituus Foundation is looking to evolve the oracle that secured crypto’s first prediction markets — becoming modular, cross-chain, and open for all.
⛩️ A Legacy of Decentralized Truth
Launched in 2015, Augur introduced the first truly decentralized, trustless, and censorship-resistant oracle — one that didn’t rely on multisigs, admin keys, or backstops.
Prediction markets built on Augur didn’t need to ask “Who am I trusting to resolve this truthfully?” The design was sound and reliable. $REP holders competed in an open, permissionless escalation game where honesty was economically enforced. No councils. No backstops. Just aligned incentives, and a final answer.
This made Augur not just a protocol, but a decentralized truth machine — one that ensured outcomes didnt need to be trusted regardless of who asked the question or how controversial it became.
That design is still rare. And it’s still needed.
🔄 Towards a Generalized Oracle
As Augur returns, Lituus Labs is exploring a new direction: decoupling the oracle from the underlying prediction markets.
The idea is to take the core escalation and forking mechanism that made Augur reliable and resilient, and make it available to anyone. Any application. Any query. Any EVM chain.
Instead of being tied to one usecase, Augur’s oracle becomes a general-purpose oracle-as-a-service, capable of resolving any applicable query submitted with a fee. This turns Augur into a modular, neutral source of truth — ready to plug into any prediction markets, price feeds, DAOs, games, insurance protocols, and more.
Ask a question, pay the fee, and get the decentralized truth.
🌉 Cross-Chain
In a multichain world, the oracle can’t stay siloed.
The model we’re exploring makes Augur’s oracle chain-agnostic: queries can originate from any chain that supports cross-chain messaging. Resolution and settlement will remain on Ethereum L1, preserving the oracle’s economic integrity.
This setup keeps the core oracle secure, neutral, and immutable, while extending its reach across the entire ecosystem — delivering final, censorship-resistant truth wherever it’s needed.
⚙️ Generalized Augur — A proposal
This is not yet a solved problem, and our proposal is a draft for comment and collaborative refinement.
Decoupling the Augur oracle from its native prediction markets has long been a difficult challenge, with past attempts running into challenges of trustlessly and autonomously setting appropriate fees, profits, and bonds without knowing open interest. This reliance on knowing the open interest has led previous Augur designs to view 3rd party use of Augur oracle as a threat to security.
The PBFM (Price-Based-Mintable-Forking) design by Ryan Garner, one of Augur’s original game theorists, is a new mechanism that appears to overcome these limitations. It’s a promising starting point: a forking framework that creates arbitrage against the attacker, forcing them to compete with the entire market.
🔮 The Vision
We want to give crypto an oracle that’s truly trustless and unstoppable — something the whole ecosystem can point to as a beacon of our values.
That won’t happen overnight. But the foundation is already there.
If you’re aligned with the mission, come get involved: Join the Discord, follow @AugurProject, or reach out directly.