Despite Bitcoin’s current success, in the wider world, decentralized technology and communities are yet to achieve central importance and ‘prove themselves’ to everyone.
Crowdfunding schemes in the past two or so years have taken the idea to the mainstream with some success - sites such as Kickstarter are now household names.
In business, however, the phenomenon has in principle yet to catch on. Honeypot style tools like Kickstarter are of course centralized, and introducing decentralization to business fundraising is still a pipe dream for most.
Crowds need not be madding
However, in 2017, that is already changing. The Blockchain that already tipped to transform business processes from data to salaries, is being harnessed to bring the wisdom of the decentralized crowd onto the main stage.
Receiving its limited alpha release this week is one company aiming to get projects funded this way as a decentralized autonomous organization hereinafter DAO. Wings.ai focuses specifically on others wishing to create DAO projects. Its platform works by allowing groups of users to predict the success of a submitted project and investing accordingly.
Accurate predictions from these so-called “prediction markets” are rewarded with Wing’s tokens, providing an incentive to participate.
Prediction markets are ‘better than experts’
“There are multiple studies done by such respected academic organizations as MIT showing that prediction markets are often producing results which are similar or even better when compared to human experts,” Wings core developer Stas Oskin told Cointelegraph.
He was quoting MIT research on prediction markets, which highlighted Vetr, a company providing crowdsourced stock ratings for stocks and exchange-traded funds.
“Our research demonstrates that Vetr’s aggregated predictions are more informative about future stock prices than any individual Wall Street analyst or the target price consensus of industry professionals only,” the research quotes CEO Mike Vien.
MIT adds that “with a searchable prediction market using incentivized participants, you could find an opinion based on the wisdom of crowds rather than reviewing individual studies from lone experts.”
Security and timesaving
Wings, however, provides tools catering specifically to project funding. For example, collected funds can be held back until a specific milestone is reached, allowing a project’s creators to lend credibility to their efforts.
Oskin explains that such tools “mimic what you might otherwise get from bank analysts, who obviously do not exist in the decentralized space.”
“As more people enter Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, they are not going to have time to evaluate projects, and this lets them leverage the opinions of hundreds, potentially thousands of people to make sure they are supporting quality projects and teams,” he added.
As of January 3, Wings has collected over 1700 BTC for project investments.