Decentralized Justice Platforms

Description

"Decentralized justice platforms are a form of “digital courts” supported by blockchain technology whose purpose is the settlement of disputes by crowdsourcing jurors under economic incentives to provide fair (Ast and Dimov, 2018) rulings. The procedure in these platforms is encoded as smart contracts on a blockchain which seeks to guarantee legal certainty6. Decentralized justice platforms aim to provide a way to resolve matters of interpretation inherent to smart contracts thus lowering transaction costs and enabling the thriving of many decentralized applications built on blockchain."

(https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2021.564551/full)

Directory

"Kleros was founded by Federico Ast and Clément Lesaege in May 2017 (Kleros Website, 2020). Development efforts for the Kleros protocol are coordinated by Coopérative Kleros, a Société Coopérative d’Intérêt Collectif (SCIC) incorporated in France. Launched on the Ethereum blockchain in July 2018, Kleros was the first decentralized justice platform to become operational and the most used at the time of this writing8. As of November 2020, nearly 500 disputes have been resolved and around 400 users participate as jurors in the platform9. This has generated around $123,000 in arbitration fees paid to jurors10.

Coopérative Kleros follows a hybrid strategy which targets both use cases native from the blockchain industry and also mainstream use cases where traditional actors from the ODR industry are already active. As for applications in the blockchain industry, the company targets dispute resolution for escrow transactions, token curated registries (the use of decentralized jurors and economic incentives for compliance verification) and dispute resolution for oracles. As for mainstream applications, Coopérative Kleros fosters the development of so-called “layer two companies” building solutions on top of the Kleros protocol Kleros blog (2020).

Aragon was founded in February 2017 by Luis Cuende and Jorge Izquierdo in Spain and is currently incorporated in the Aragon Association which is a non-profit entity based in Zug, Switzerland Aragon Wiki (2020). The vision of the Aragon project is to provide software tools for users to create decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) (Aragon Website, 2020). Aragon launched their decentralized court in November 2019 with a mechanism design heavily inspired by Kleros work (Aragon, 2020). According to Aragon sources, the court has 239 jurors Aragon Network (2020) but do not inform about the number of resolved disputes.

In the case of Aragon, the court service seems focused on providing arbitration services for DAOs within the Aragon ecosystem. The main use case envisaged in the white paper Aragon Whitepaper (2020) is the resolution of disputes on voting proposals in DAOs that may contradict the “constitution” of the organization. Through a vote on the Aragon court, the proposal could be declared “unconstitutional” and overturned.

Jur was founded in October 2017 by Alessandro Palombo and Giotto De Filippi in Switzerland through a “Société civile/Société commerciale” under Swiss law11. At the time of this writing, Jur still has not released a working product. The project’s white paper claims that the system will cover a wide variety of cases through three different courts: the Court Layer (a system similar to a traditional ODR system with traditional arbitrators for higher value disputes, which they claim can produce legally binding rulings), the Open Layer (a system more akin to Kleros with a decision making logic based on collective intelligence) and the Community Layer (a kind of private court with specifics rules defined by creators). Jur strategy seems focused on enterprise use cases. While they started building on Ethereum, in July 2018 they switched to the blockchain Vechain in an attempt to focus on the enterprise segment".

(https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2021.564551/full)