Erasure and Numerai Are Making ETH Tokens Useful Again

On December 3, 2018, Numerai’s NMR development team announced the complete re-design of the token in an attempt to implement total decentralization.

Numerai, NMR 2.0

Numerai’s team recently announced in a Medium post that it was planning to implement significant changes to the token.The team is confident to have one of the best tokens in the Ethereum network and feels that the current model needs considerable changes before it can succeed. With these ambitions in mind, the team announced it was cutting the supply by roughly 50 percent so that it could transition to a more decentralized option. Numerai developers say that few people use Ethereum, and when they do, they usually use Ether. This means that most of the tokens on the Ethereum platform are useless. When a user buys a CryptoKitty, for instance, they pay in ETH; or when a trader executes an order using the 0x protocol, they don’t necessarily need the 0x token.Even though there is still much to be done with the NMR token, people are already using it. However, there are still a lot of negative points that remain to be fixed. These are:

“NMR is centralizedNMR is an application not a protocolNMR token has no governance rightsNMR use is limited to Numerai data scientistsNMR can be diluted if Numerai mints millions of new NMRs”

These are all negative aspects that the team is about to eliminate by enabling Erasure.

What Is Erasure?

Erasure is a decentralized data marketplace that the NMR team announced last month. It allows anyone to upload data, stake it with NMR, build a reputation, and earn money.

With Erasure, all the development made by the Numerai team will be open to the world on a decentralized protocol. The NMR team hopes to increase the usage of NMR, solve a few of Numerai’s problems, and, most importantly, create an exceptional and innovative data marketplace.The NMR team sees its community as its biggest asset as it is the base that will help provide them with the first data feeds. Erasure is said to be built on top of the NMR token by a specialized team that was specifically hired to work exclusively on Erasure. The teams boast lots of experience and are coming from Bridgewater, ConsenSys, and Polymath.

Erasure has the potential of totally decentralizing the NMR token, meaning that NMR smart contracts will no longer be controlled or upgradable by Numerai.The team will disable the NMR token to power Numerai’s hedge fund while they turn it into a protocol. These developments will enable anyone to use NMR to build prediction markets that can go from sports to journalism and all operate on top of Erasure.With these transformations, NMR owners will have control over Erasure turning it into a governance token. Apart from this, Erasure will also introduce thousands of new use cases to Numerai.