Morpher Labs attempts to crack knotty prediction market problems

On August 31, 2020, Morpher Labs announced the launch of its flagship Ethereum-based contract trading and prediction market platform, Morpher, with the stated goal of providing users unlimited access to long-and-short trades of real-world stocks, commodities, and FOREX markets.

In a recent interview with Cointelegraph, Morpher Labs CEO Martin Forehler explained that Morpher's vision is to allow worldwide access to asset classes that normally have multiple barriers in the form of geographical restrictions, middlemen, and steep fees.

Prediction market Augur allows users to bet on the outcome of real-world events - say, if the price of a specific asset exceeds a certain threshold within a specified date - but the protocol has never managed to crack $3 million in TVL, according to DeFi Pulse.

Morpher is attempting to tackle the liquidity problem with a token-economic solution.

"E.g. a 100 MPH token bet on Apple becomes 110 MPH if Apple gains 10%, or 90 MPH if Apple loses 10%.".

"To give an example," Piyankov explained to Cointelegraph, "If currently 1 MPH is traded for 0.015 DAI and then all of a sudden the total supply of MPH doubles, would it be possible to sell all those newly minted MPH for 0.015 DAI each, or would this drive the price of MPH down?".

"If the average user has a return of say five percent per year, there are five percent more MPH token that year. Assuming a constant market capitalization, only users with returns greater than five percent make a profit, while everyone with lower returns has a loss," he says.

According to Forehler, in the nearly two months since launch Morpher has attracted 28 thousand users.

The Morpher Twitter account has reported numerous withdrawal outages.

"We are convinced that the full potential of the Morpher Protocol will only unfold once it is universally accessible, and we are working hard on making that happen."