REP is the native cryptocurrency of Augur, which is software that gives users incentives to maintain and enhance a prediction market running on the Ethereum blockchain.

Unlike exchanges where assets are traded, prediction markets let users bet on the outcome of future events. Users can create and exchange “shares” of an outcome and its value without relying on intermediaries.

The Forecast Foundation developed Augur in 2014, and sold its native tokens to the public in an initial coin offering (ICO) in 2015. During the ICO, 8.8 million REP tokens were sold for $5.5 million, but Augur didn’t go live on the Ethereum blockchain until 2018.

The total supply of Augur tokens is 6.9 million REP, and unlike with most other cryptocurrencies, new REP won’t be issued in the future.

REP price hit its all-time high of $341.85 in February 2016, but has never come close to that level since. In January 2018, REP prices briefly returned above $100 but crashed again as the entire market turned bearish. Despite a few slight uptrends since that time, REP has mostly traded in the $20-$25 range.

Augur runs on the Ethereum network and uses Ethereum’s consensus mechanism and blockchain features. The project runs on smart contracts issued on the Ethereum blockchain and will benefit from the upcoming ETH 2.0 sharding support.

Sharding is a blockchain scaling solution that involves using multiple smaller blockchains to process transactions and smart contracts, as opposed to a single blockchain. This solution will enable Ethereum to handle significantly more transactions per second, reducing transaction time and costs. This mean faster and cheaper transactions for Augur users too.

All purchases of shares in Augur’s prediction market are made with eth, the native token of Ethereum, or with the stablecoin dai.

Augur has a four-layer execution process:

Augur was founded by Forecast Foundation, a venture founded by biophysicist Jack Peterson and investor Joey Krug, among others, in 2014. After the ICO in 2015, the project raised undisclosed amounts in two funding rounds in 2016 and 2017. All of the project’s founders are still on board, except for Matt Liston, who left in 2014. The network had a major upgrade in September 2021.