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All REP holders must migrate their tokens by August 1, 2026, to remain part of the active Augur ecosystem Augur, one of Ethereum’s earliest decentralized prediction-market and oracle projects, today announced that the second and final phase of its Moon Fork is entering its final days, with the two-month migration window for all holders of its REP token closing on August 1.

REP holders must migrate their tokens 1:1 into an outcome-specific version of REP by August 1, 2026. Migration is one-way and irreversible. Tokens that remain in the legacy Augur universe after the window closes will no longer be able to follow the active protocol and are likely to lose their economic value. After that point, unmigrated REP can no longer be converted.

Migration tooling is available through Augur’s official fork interface at 6.augurfork.eth.limo, together with a step-by-step guide and frequently asked questions.

The fork is a live demonstration of how a decentralized system can defend a truthful outcome without any central authority ruling on the result. That security depends on participation: REP only protects the protocol when its holders act.

A live test of Augur’s economic security model The Moon Fork began on April 8 with an intentionally escalated dispute over the question: Did the Artemis II mission successfully lift off in the first week of April?

The dispute was initiated by longtime Augur community member Micah Zoltu to test the protocol’s full resolution process under real economic conditions. The correct outcome was “Yes.”

The process was designed to test the mechanism from beginning to end, including participant incentives, capital formation, dispute escalation and token migration. Augur entered the fork after enough REP was committed across successive dispute rounds to activate the protocol’s final resolution backstop. 

The fork consists of two phases.

Phase one: The escalation game From April through early June, REP holders could stake on competing answers through a series of increasingly expensive dispute rounds.

Each round required more capital than the one before it. Participants staking on the ultimately accepted outcome were eligible to earn a return funded by the losing side, creating a financial incentive for the wider market to oppose manipulation.

“Most people will interact with Augur during the escalation game, which lets outcomes battle it out by seeing who can raise more money. The losers pay out the winners. Since it’s easier to raise money on an outcome people believe to be true, that’s the one with the advantage. So in this phase we try to outspend the attacker, and if we can’t, we go to phase two,” said Phill Monastirsky, co-founder of the Lituus Foundation, which stewards Augur.

The escalation process continued until the dispute reached Augur’s fork threshold. Phase one is now complete.

Phase two: Mandatory REP migration The protocol has now split into separate outcome-specific universes. Every REP holder must choose a universe and migrate their REP into the corresponding token.

“Failing to outspend the attacker, we now try to maximize their cost by forcing them into a worthless token,” said Phill. “The protocol splits into tokens corresponding to the possible outcomes, with 51% required to win. Since future Augur fees only continue on the truthful token, the attacker is forced to move 51% of the token supply into something worthless. In the Augur Lituus design, this rises to near 100%. As long as it costs them more to do that than they gain from misresolving the market, we are safe.”

Future official Augur development funded by the Lituus Foundation will continue on the universe corresponding with the truthful outcome: that Artemis II successfully lifted off during the period specified by the market.

The Foundation has migrated its own holdings and added liquidity to the corresponding token.

What REP holders need to do REP holders should take the following steps before August 1:

Hold REP in a self-custodied Ethereum wallet or confirm that their exchange will support the migration Visit 6.augurfork.eth.limo/#/migration Connect the wallet holding REP Migrate REP 1:1 into the outcome-specific token corresponding with the truthful result Confirm receipt of the new REP token in the connected wallet Migration cannot be reversed once completed.

REP held on centralized exchanges may require action by the exchange rather than the individual user. The Lituus Foundation has been working with exchanges to support migration on behalf of their users. Kraken has confirmed support; other exchanges have not, and holders should not assume support unless their exchange states it explicitly. Current exchange-support status is maintained at v3.augur.net/#exchange-support.

Exchange support may change during the migration period. Holders who cannot confirm support should withdraw their REP to a self-custodied wallet and complete the migration directly.

Why the fork matters Prediction-market platforms ultimately depend on a resolution process to determine which outcome occurred and where funds should be paid.

Many systems rely on companies, committees, token votes, multisigs or discretionary intervention. Augur was designed around a different model: an open economic process in which participants can challenge an outcome and are financially rewarded for defending the result the broader market recognizes as true.

When a dispute reaches the fork stage, REP separates into tokens associated with each possible outcome. Holders decide which universe will carry the protocol’s future economic activity by migrating into it.

The design shifts the security question away from whether a sufficiently wealthy attacker can temporarily influence a vote. Instead, it asks whether an attacker is willing to acquire and sacrifice enough REP to support a false universe that users, developers and liquidity providers may subsequently abandon.

Demonstrating the mechanism behind Augur’s next chapter The Moon Fork is testing Augur v2’s dispute architecture. Future implementations will differ from the original system, but the live exercise demonstrates the escalation-and-fork pattern underpinning Augur’s continuing oracle research.

That work includes Augur Lituus, a proposed modular resolution layer designed to allow prediction markets and other applications to outsource disputed real-world outcomes to an open, economically secured oracle.

The Lituus Foundation is funding continued work on Augur’s decentralized resolution infrastructure. The prediction-market platform under development through the separate Dark Florist workstream is expected to support the branches created through the fork, rather than the legacy unmigrated REP token.

The live migration provides a practical demonstration of Augur’s core thesis: a prediction market should not depend on any single party having the authority to declare what happened.

Important migration information Migration deadline: August 1, 2026
Migration ratio: 1:1
Migration status: Mandatory for holders who want to remain part of the active Augur ecosystem
Migration direction: One-way and irreversible
Migration portal: 6.augurfork.eth.limo/#/migration

Holders should consult the official migration interface and Augur channels for the latest technical instructions and exchange-support updates.

About Augur Augur is a decentralized prediction-market and oracle project originally built on Ethereum. Its dispute system uses open participation and economic incentives, with algorithmic forking as a final backstop, to resolve contested real-world outcomes.

About the Lituus Foundation The Lituus Foundation stewards the revival and continued development of Augur. The Foundation supports open-source development carrying Augur’s oracle research and engineering forward.

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Some of the most popular companies in the cryptoeconomy have banded together to create an organization that will assess and rate top cryptocurrency projects on the likelihood of these projects being securities per U.S. federal securities laws.

That organization, the Crypto Rating Council (CRC), counts exchange operators like Bittrex, Coinbase, Kraken, and Poloniex-backers Circle among its first members, as well as the firms of Anchorage, DRW Cumberland, Genesis, and Grayscale Investments.

So why the need for such a body?

The so-called Howey Test, which is a test devised by the U.S. Supreme Court to determine if a given asset is a security, commonly leads to “judgment calls, inconsistent results, and … disagreement among legal experts,” the CRC said on the Frequently Asked Questions section of its new website.

Accordingly, the organization’s rating system — which runs from 1 to 5, with 5 indicating an asset bears the hallmarks of a security and 1 meaning the opposite — is being hailed by members as a “compliance tool” that will help bring consistency to their respective asset review processes.

Founded by prominent companies across the crypto industry, our mission is to lead crypto financial services firms committed to practical compliance with the U.S. securities laws. We are the Crypto Rating Council, and we launched today: https://t.co/FbdwfSZN9D

— Crypto Rating Council (@CRC_Crypto) September 30, 2019

“The CRC will publish a simple rating for most assets it reviews to indicate the results of its analysis as a reference for operators, developers, and the public,” the organization said.

With that said, the ratings are utterly non-binding and have been made without involvement from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). So, while clarity is the professed goal, the only thing the CRC has ultimately made more clear is what its members think about the legal status of top cryptocurrencies in America.

“The score does not reflect a legal conclusion and is no indication of qualitative value of an asset or suitability for investment or any other purpose,” the CRC said of its ratings.

How the First Scores Look Don’t expect any surprises when it comes to bitcoin (BTC). The oldest cryptocurrency, which has long been held up by various stakeholders as a standard for decentralized projects, received a 1 rating from the CRC.

Other projects the body deemed to have “few or no characteristics consistent with treatment as a security” included DeFi’s darling Dai stablecoin, the popular Monero (XMR) privacy cryptocurrency, and Litecoin (LTC).

The 2 rating was given to the next rung of projects that the CRC deemed to seem mostly decentralized according to its framework. These projects included Ethereum (ETH), Zcash (ZEC), Numeraire (NMR), ChainLink (LINK), and the fledgling proof-of-stake project Algorand (ALGO).

Getting on up there according to the group were projects like Augur (3.75), EOS (3.75), Stellar (3.75), Tezos (3.75), and XRP (4). The highest inaugural scores were given to Polymath (4.5) and Maker (4.5).

Notably, the SEC announced just hours after these ratings were released that Block.one, the team behind the EOS launch, had settled charges and would pay a $24 million civil penalty for its year-long ICO being an unregistered security offering.

The Commission said the securities status only applied to the “IOU” ERC20 token that was issued during the sale rather than the current EOS cryptocurrency, which lives on EOS now rather than Ethereum.

Are Exchanges Listing Securities? One question that immediately started buzzing through the ecosystem on the heels of the announcement of the CRC was why would exchanges like Coinbase take chances on assets like XRP that appear to bear considerable resemblances to a security in the U.S.?

One possibility is that the group’s members consider “security status is binary,” according to Jake Chervinsky, the General Counsel of DeFi lending project Compound Finance. In other words, anything less than a 5 rating would be fair game accordingly.

My best guess: they'd say security status is binary and as a matter of law it doesn't make a difference how close a token comes to being a security if it's ultimately not one.

On that logic, though, query the value of publishing the five-point score in the first place.

— Jake Chervinsky (@jchervinsky) September 30, 2019

But even if the already rated cryptocurrencies later end up being cleared as “not securities” per the SEC, the CRC rating system can lead to future conflicts of interest, e.g. member exchanges being charitable in their ratings because they stand to gain from trade volume.

In my opinion, this rating system creates a massive conflict of interest. All of the companies that joined this consortium are massively incentivized to rate the vast majority of tokens as non-securities. Coinbase listed some very questionable tokens including XRP, Tezos, EOS

— Larry Cermak (@lawmaster) September 30, 2019

But there’s a silver lining here, according to Blockchain chief executive officer and president Marco Santori. In a Twitter thread on the CRC announcement, Santori said the effort was suspect in some ways but was also a positive attempt at self-regulation in an industry that needs more regulatory clarity in general.

8/ So why on earth would they publish this? Why on earth should we applaud their effort?

Well, actually we should.

As an industry, this stuff is basically the best we've got.

THAT'S RIGHT ITS A TWIST

wait hear me out.

— Marco Santori (@msantoriESQ) September 30, 2019

William M. Peaster

William M. Peaster is a professional writer and editor who specializes in the Ethereum, Dai, and Bitcoin beats in the cryptoeconomy. He's appeared in Blockonomi, Binance Academy, Bitsonline, and more. He enjoys tracking smart contracts, DAOs, dApps, and the Lightning Network. He's learning Solidity, too! Contact him on Telegram at @wmpeaster