Earlier this year we have attempted to create a prediction market prototype on Steem with SteemSports, however we ran into several challenges, which have been elegantly solved by the Peerplays team.
Do you happen to have a blog specifically about this? I would love to know more.
We ran into technical and people issues.
As far as people issues go, we had divergent views on what direction should the project be taken in. I had been more interested in developing prediction games for different markets, but we also had something working with sports, and not enough momentum to bridge the gap.
As far as tech goes, our games would have been semi-decentralized. The games are still provably fair, because all game details and wagers are recorded on the immutable chain (Steem), but there is counterparty risk (it might be somehow remedied with escrow).
Peerplays on the other hand just nailed it. The Peerplays team has put a lot of effort into developing a robust, generally useful solution, so we eventually just conceded.
meep