Cassandra

Inspiration

Reading some of the literature about prediction markets and trying to do it better.

What it does

Cassandra is a prediction markets protocol that allows users to trade for free on the Terra blockchain. Collateral tokens in prediction markets are staked into yield generating protocols, which is how Cassandra captures value.

How we built it

Cassandra's smart contracts are built with Rust and Cosmwasm. Our backend relayer which matches up orders and submits them to settlement contracts was built with Fastapi and Mongodb. Our frontend which interfaces with the backend relayer and the blockchain was built with React.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest challenge was integrating with Terra.js and giving the frontend the ability to query and send transactions to the blockchain. Our frontend developer started with no experience working with blockchains or Terra, and had to learn everything on the spot.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We joined the hackathon really late, so we ended up having to hack everything together mostly over the course of two days. We're proud of shipping a reasonable product in such a short timeframe.

What we learned

In trying to figure out how to build a better prediction market, we did a lot of research into what makes markets efficient, as well as what business factors led to Robinhood's initial success and the retail trading boom. There were also really cool ideas about how prediction markets could be used to help societies make better decisions, one example of this was futarchy as a form of governance.

What's next for Cassandra

There are two ways that Cassandra can scale. The first is that our off-chain matching engine and on-chain settlement contract is generally useful on Terra for things that aren't prediction tokens. We plan to spin this out into its own protocol to bring more liquidity to Terra.

Secondly, the utility of prediction markets really shines in decision making. We plan to build out a futarchy module in Cassandra and open up creating new markets to the general public, so people can use Cassandra to find the answers to questions they have.