Applications
GLOBs have the power to revolutionize finance on blockchains. This page provides a high-level overview; more details will be added in corresponding subsections.
Decentralized Prediction Markets
Prediction markets (PMs) have been posited as a key application of blockchain technology and have driven much of the latter's early development. There are a bunch of advantages:
- Clear rules (eg. transparent fee structure and execution, no special roles)
- Permissionlessness (no banning of great traders)
- Pseudonymity (information free to appear)
- Promised payouts (no bankruptcy)
- Censorship resistance (enabling trust when stakes are high, such as for whistle-blowing)
Prediction markets have so far suffered from low liquidity. GLOBs can change that.
Decentralized Swaps
Because of Uniswap's initial success, many still believe that the problem of exchanging pairs of arbitrary fungible digital assets on blockchains is solved. While theoretically true, the simple automated market makers turned out to be unsuitable both for illiquid as well as for popular assets due to losses of passive liquidity and other inefficiencies.
Furthermore, while order books nowadays exist on blockchains to mitigate the worst problems of automated market makers, they can never be competitive with centralized exchanges: liquidity needs speed, and speed is cheaper for centralized entities than on distributed ledger systems.
Due to the fundamental changes to the market microstructure in GLOBs, they finally enable scalable decentralized exchanges.