Veil Is Looking To Make Decentralized Financial Products “Frictionless”

As things stand, one of the biggest issues keeping investors from adopting decentralized products is the fact that most of these offerings are still “not smooth and seamless” in terms of their overall usability. For example, when making use of decentralized prediction market platform ‘Augur’, customers still have to undergo many tedious, multi-layered processes just to employ some of the basic features being offered by the platform.

Founded by Paul Fletcher-Hill, Graham Kaemmer, and Feridun Mert Celebi, the goal of Veil is to make Augur’s native UI more accessible to the average novice user.

As many of our readers already know, Augur is designed to help users create and trade “prediction markets” on a wide array of topics that can range from sporting events, to politics, to altcoin prices. Not only that, each and every market on Augur is settled via the use of decentralized oracles — that completely eliminate the need for centralized market makers.

With that being said, using Augur is quite a tedious task which can leave many customers frustrated.

“Too often we take for granted that our users share the same philosophy as us. We sometimes copy centralized products and just create a decentralized version of them rather than coming up with totally new things that are differentiated as products and not because of their implementation.”

According to the creators of the platform, Veil is all set to improve Augur’s usability in the following ways:

(i) For starters, Veil will completely get rid of the need for users to download and sync their apps to the Ethereum’s network. Not only that, by implementing the “faster and cheaper 0x protocol”, Veil has the potential to substantially decrease the number of transactions that need to be processed “on-chain” — thereby providing customers with a customized version of Wrapped ETH, called the Veil ETH.

(ii) Another core aspect of Veil is its ability to settle markets faster than Augur by offering users with a feature called “paid instant settlements” which allows them to immediately sell their shares at a reported price (rather than having to wait for Augur to finalize a particular market). However, upon its launch, the platform will only be offering support for four markets, namely:

Bearing all of the above stated facts in mind, it should be remembered that even though Veil’s functionality does help reduce user friction to a large degree, the process of using a decentralized platform still remains quite complex. For example, when using Veil, customers will need to know how to deploy Web3 wallets as well as extensions like MetaMask or Cipher.

As things stand, it is worth noting that the folks over at Veil have already been able to raise a substantial amount of money from a wide array of notable investors like Paradigm, Sequoia Capital, and 1confirmation.

When asked in a recent interview about the need of making Veil completely decentralized, co-Founder Fletcher-Hill was quoted as saying:

“WE BELIEVE IN A DECENTRALIZED WEB AND THAT PEOPLE SHOULD BE ABLE TO USE SOPHISTICATED FINANCIAL PRODUCTS WITHOUT GIVING UP ACCESS TO THEIR MONEY. AS A DEVELOPER, IT’S JUST EASIER TO PROGRAM THINGS LIKE PAYMENTS, TRADE EXECUTION, OR SETTLEMENT USING A SMART CONTRACT PLATFORM THAN THE TRADITIONAL BANKING SYSTEM.”

Last but not least, according to Fletcher-Hill, Veil will be launched on the Ethereum mainnet within the coming few days (January 15, 2019 to be exact).

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