$20K in Crypto: The First Bets on Prediction Market Augur Just Paid Out

Augur, a decentralized platform for creating predictions markets, just hit a major milestone.

"The first markets have successfully resolved," the project tweeted Wednesday.

Payments of ether worth around $20,000 are now going out to the first brave crop of users, who used the betting platform without knowing for sure whether it would work as advertised.

The handful of early markets "Seem to have resolved fine," Augur co-founder Joey Krug told CoinDesk.

The most valuable market was for the outcome of the France-Belgium World Cup semifinal game.

More than one user in a community forum expressed relief and congratulated the Augur team on Wednesday.

One of these, Kitsana Dounglomchan, confirmed that he'd received the ether fees he was owed - users earn these fees for creating or reporting the outcome of a prediction market - as well as the "Reputation" or REP tokens he'd staked.

"Hats off to the entire Augur team," Dounglomchan wrote.

The first round of market settlements on Augur was relatively small, Krug said, because "It was basically only markets where the event actually happened in the first 17 hours or so after launch."

The amount of money staked on Augur prediction markets has ballooned in recent days.