Ethereum-Based Veil is Shutting Down, Describes Its Future Plans

Veil, a predictions platform based on the Ethereum blockchain, is finished and closing its doors according to a post from the company on July 11. “The most important update is that our team has decided to sunset the Veil product,” starts the article, written by Paul Fletcher-Hill, the editor at the company.

Shutting down for good

The post continues, describing just how difficult it was to make this decision.

“This was a tough decision to make, but ultimately we failed to find a good fit between what we were building and the market as it exists today. 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.”

What’s happening to the project instead? Well, there won’t be any more markets added to the platform. From there, users can still participate in online trading on the platform for the next two weeks. However, on July 24th, 2019, trading will shut down for good. But, the platform will still be supported by the company until Augur v2 goes live. The post recommends that users do the following three things:

1. Redeem all of one’s open positions within the market. There are no fees to pay either, so take advantage of that while you can.
2. From there, a user should withdraw any holds they have in active markets. “Nearly all Veil markets are Augur markets under-the-hood,” so they’re convertible.
3. Take out Veil Ether and turn it into traditional Ether.

The entire asset is non-custodial, so these steps can be done automatically. Yet, the post recommends that you do this while the platform is still live.

Planning for the future

Not all is lost, though. As soon as Augur v2 goes live, the company will “deploy a tool to let anyone who holds a position in any AugurLite markets” to turn that into an Augur v2 one. Finally, the post explains why this shutdown is even happening:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. We weren’t decentralized or regulated. Some users want a fully decentralized, unstoppable product and others want a regulated product. It’s hard to offer something in between that people find valuable.

Overall, we hope for the best for the project in the long run.