Decentralized parametric mutual and weather prediction markets
Version 0.6 — May 2026
Aratea /əˈreɪtiə/ — from the Latin Aratea, the canonical Roman translations of Aratus of Soli's Phaenomena (3rd century BC), the first antique treatise on reading the signs of the sky.
Note — A French version of this white paper is also available. The landing page directs each visitor to the version matching their language.
The project was renamed from Augure to Aratea on 11 May 2026, after identification of a frontal collision with Augur, the historical prediction-market protocol on Ethereum (launched 2014, $REP token, in an active public relaunch phase in 2026). Augur operates in the exact same vertical (prediction markets), with full English homophony; the risk of user confusion and copycat requalification was structural, not navigable.
Aratea comes from the Latin Aratea, the canonical title of the Roman translations (Cicero, Germanicus, then the medieval manuscript tradition) of the Phaenomena by Aratus of Soli (3rd century BC). Aratus wrote two complementary poems: Phaenomena, on observational astronomy, and Diosemeia — literally "the signs of Zeus" — the first systematic antique treatise on reading meteorological omens. Rain, wind, drought, frost: Aratus codified the observation of the sky to anticipate the weather. The narrative continuity is direct — Aratea, in 2026, builds the on-chain infrastructure that prices and underwrites the climatic events on which Aratus already sought to put probabilities 23 centuries ago.
Migration in progress. The rebrand is enacted on the governance and public-documentation side — this white paper is the first such act. Migration of technical artefacts (GitHub repository, Vercel deployments, Solidity contracts, internal paths, Discord identifiers) is in progress and will be completed before the public opening of Phase 2. During the transition, aratea/ references in this document may still resolve to legacy augure/ paths in some public artefacts — it is the same project.
POC token symbol preserved. The Phase 1 token deployed on Arbitrum Sepolia keeps its legacy AUG-POC symbol throughout the POC, regardless of the project rename. The ERC-20 contract is immutable on-chain: redeploying solely to rename the symbol would discard the mint history and force a re-bootstrap of balances and on-chain state, with no operational gain. The rename to ARA happens at the DAO transition (Phase 2), via the dedicated AraConverter contract that burns AUG-POC and emits ARA at a holder-voted ratio (see §7.2).
Aratea is an open-source project building on-chain infrastructure that combines two bricks today held apart: a community-driven weather prediction model and a decentralized parametric mutual.
The prediction engine combines (i) a meta-ensemble of meteorological AIs (operationally ECMWF, GraphCast, GFS, JMA; in integration WindBorne WeatherMesh, NWS NDFD, NOAA HRRR, Tomorrow.io; on hold pending edge validation Aurora, FourCastNet, Pangu-Weather) and (ii) a learned predictor trained on our own resolved outcomes, with a discipline of named, hypothesised, empirically-weighted features. It produces probability distributions over measurable climate events, refined by an open incentive loop. These distributions serve two purposes:
The project issues a single token (AUG-POC during Phase 1, convertible into ARA after the DAO is set up) governed by a simple principle: every contribution — capital or labor — is converted into BTC at the moment of contribution and minted at current NAV. No pre-allocation, no founder bonus, no privileged category. The cap table emerges from effective contributions, measured on observable public artifacts (Git, on-chain deposits).
Aratea is not insurance in the meaning of the French Code des assurances or of Solvency II. It is a decentralized discretionary mutual: members pool capital, and indemnification follows automatic parametric mechanics backed by oracles, governed by token holders. This legal distinction is central — section 4 expands on it.