The Big PlotX Update

PlotX
PlotX
Published in
4 min readNov 23, 2020

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The PlotX Beta made a debut on the Ethereum mainnet on Oct 13 ’20; since then, it has seen participation from over 330 unique addresses who predicted in various markets with a combined value of over $60,000.

Being a bootstrapped network, it is important to also recognize the fact that liquidity in the PlotX Prediction Markets is erratic at times. This greatly affects the user experience and is something the team is cognizant of.

The Challenges

The key reasons for lower/erratic liquidity, have been hypothesised by both the community as well as the team:

  • Hourly markets are too short

Taking into account the time it generally takes for a user to create an hourly market, for users to discover the market, and for a single user to make a prediction in the market, it is clear that the time frame of 60 minutes is too less to attract enough liquidity for every hourly market. This results in low participation and thus low liquidity in these markets as compared to the daily or the weekly markets.

  • Gas fee becomes prohibitively high

The Gas fee for performing actions like placing predictions, staking PLOT, claiming rewards etc gets prohibitively high due to the Ethereum network congestion. This results in lower participation when the Gas prices are high (which has been fairly often lately) and thus impacting the liquidity negatively.

  • Not enough incentives to create markets

The current reward of 50 PLOT turned out to be less than enough to cover the gas costs for creating markets. This also affected the liquidity in the markets due to markets being created a lot more erratically than envisioned.

The Solution

Studying the challenges and taking due feedback from the community, the team has released multiple proposals in the research forum to tackle the above mentioned challenges.

Hourly markets to be replaced by 4-hour markets

After analyzing the journey a PlotX user goes through while participating in an hourly market, the team realized that most of the time it becomes too difficult for an hourly market to gather enough liquidity. This results in participants not having enough incentive to participate in hourly markets, which further amplifies the issue.

To solve this problem, hourly markets are now being replaced by 4-hour markets. The new category of 4-hour markets gives users enough time to create, discover, and promote these markets while keeping them short enough to keep the excitement alive.

Read more about this proposal here

A new gas optimisation strategy

To increase participation in all types of markets on the platform, it is essential to bring down the current gas costs for performing actions like making predictions, claiming rewards, staking PLOT etc.

To achieve this goal, the team is introducing a new strategy to bring down the gas costs across the board, as can be seen in the infographic below.

Read more about this proposal here

Note — This update will take effect by the end of November.

Increasing Market Creation Rewards

Another PlotX Improvement Proposal (PIP) that was raised by the team proposed to change the market creator rewards from a static value of 50 PLOT to a dynamically calculated amount of $PLOT that potentially has an equal monetary value as the amount of $ETH they spend in Gas fees, essentially emulating Gas-less market creation transaction.

Market creators would also have the opportunity to grab up to 5% of the reward pool of their created markets. More details here.

This new rewards system will not only motivate users to create more markets on the platform but also encourage them to get more liquidity in their created markets as it’ll have a direct impact on their rewards.

Read more about this proposal here

Other minor updates

  • In order to make it easier for users to spread the word about PlotX markets, we are introducing social media share buttons in each market.
  • Users will now be able to predict using their pending rewards instead of having to claim them first! This one was quite a popular request from users.
  • Users will now also be able to deposit their ETH or PLOT in the PlotX Market smart contract, in a non-custodial manner, to make multiple predictions without having to transfer funds every time.

Using pending rewards and the ‘deposit & predict’ functionality are a part of the gas optimisation strategy and will be released at the same time.

Wrapping up

These upgrades have been envisioned to create a positive impact on the liquidity in PlotX prediction markets.

It is also important to note that every smart contract change undergoes a mandatory smart contract security audit by an external auditor.

If after reading this post, you have any doubts about any of the above mentioned changes, you are welcome to participate in the discussion on Telegram, Discord, and the PlotX Forum.

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PlotX
PlotX

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