www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-groundhog-day

The post credits “crypto traders” with inventing the **perpetual future**. But the concept predates cryptocurrency markets by decades. Economist **Robert J. Shiller** discussed and *proposed* a **“perpetual futures contract”** in a Cowles Foundation discussion paper published **November 1, 1992**. Crypto exchanges later popularized *crypto* perpetual swaps/futures, but claiming that crypto traders **invented** the instrument is historically incorrect: the instrument’s design was described in academic finance literature long before modern crypto trading existed.

This sentence makes two concrete factual claims that don’t match the historical record: 1) **Timing of the fundraising:** Augur’s initial coin offering (ICO) that raised “over $5 million” occurred in **2015**, not “in the late 2010s.” 2) **Whether software was produced:** Augur did ship a product—CoinDesk reports that Augur was **launching its main network in July 2018**. (Whether any given user found it *good* is subjective, but it’s not accurate to say it “never managed to create usable software” as a categorical statement.) So the post’s description is misleading on the date of the fundraise and incorrectly implies Augur never launched a functioning network.