Imagine a world without a justice system! Supposing we have no courts to hear our cases when we feel offended. The world would have, most likely, retrogressed than progressed. There would be laws and principles but nobody to obey them because each individual would do whatever pleases them regardless of who is hurt or offended and no authority would restrain them from doing so. As a result of this, development, civilization and innovation would be unfairly stalled and, in place of peaceful coexistence amongst men and women of different cultures and religions, there would be chaos and war.
But luckily, we have a justice system where disputes are resolved. This system has become the bond of unity, coexistence and seed of progress that we enjoy in the world today. The relative peace it brings has helped us to work in teams to achieve some beautiful things that have greatly impacted positively on the world, some of which are Internet and blockchain technologies – online facilities that have provided people with the opportunity of passing information to one another, seeking knowledge from distant people, chatting and doing businesses without having to meet physically.
These same people who are already accustomed to shaping their behavior in the physical world due to a justice system that will penalize them if they violet a given agreement have suddenly found themselves on another space where nobody holds anybody accountable for what they did or what they did not do.
Therefore, some malicious fellows now do all sorts of things that betray the trust of unsuspecting members of the public who have genuinely taken their businesses to the internet. And such attitude is beginning to mar the beauty of the internet and blockchains by creating mistrust amongst members of the public.
Although, lately, there has been the introduction of smart contract features into most of the blokchains but that alone is not enough because while it may help individuals feel more secure at the time of transactions, it cannot judge a case to decide who is right and who is wrong if a dispute arises between two parties. To address this challenge, Kleros rose to duty to create a blockchain-based dispute resolution system.
Kleros is an online court where disputes that happen between two or more parties in every kind of contract are settled. Be it simple or highly complex dispute, Kleros is well positioned to proficiently administer justice in a fast but diligent manner. Kleros is built on the Ethereum blockchain by a team of experts who leverage the technologies of crowdsourcing, game theory and blockchain to build a justice system which offers true decisions in a secure, fast and cheap way.
By embracing the services of Kleros, buyers, sellers and anybody who carry out any form of transaction online can feel safe because if anything goes wrong, Kleros is a reliable place to get justice. This is possible when smart contracts integrate the Kleros resolution mechanism and design Kleros as their arbitrator. When an agreement is reached between two parties to run a certain transaction, using the smart contract, Kleros will allow them to choose how many jurors will judge their case if a dispute arises. They will also choose which court their case will be judged in. There are several different courts under Kleros that are furnished with different jurors who are experts in their respective fields.
For instance, if party A awards a contract to party B to develop a building plan under a smart contract that has Kleros as its arbitrator, the right court to choose is architecture court because that is where experienced architects serve as jurors who are incentivized to make sincere conclusions on cases that are sent to them.
PREVENTION OF SHARP PRACTICES FROM BOTH ENDS OF JURORS AND USERS
Kleros has measure in place to ensure that both jurors who work to earn from arbitration fees and users who pay the fees do not discredit Kleros by any form of misconduct.
A token called Pinakion (PNK) is used as the system token. Anybody who shows interest in serving as a juror will have to deposit some amount of PNK. The higher the amount of PNK one deposits, the better his chances of being selected to judge in disputes and earn arbitration fees. This will prevent the system from selecting inactive jurors.
Also, the system will drop incoherent jurors who consistently judge poorly. An incoherent juror is one who votes differently from others. The majority voters win and earn arbitration fee while the incoherent juror loses part of his deposited PNK token. This helps to promote fairness and commitment among jurors.
KLEROS SOLUTION IS COST EFFECTIVE
Not only is getting justice from a traditional court time consuming, it equally involves series of logistics. For this reason, people are selective of what is worthy of seeking legal redress for. When the value of what they are losing is not much, they rather endure the pain than go to court.
But here, Kleros is not asking you to appear in court over and over again with witnesses. The only witness you need is the smart contract terms which Kleros already has even before you lodge a dispute.
The money you are to spend is just the arbitration fee which is only a mere fraction of what would be required in traditional court. This means, cases of all magnitude will receive fair hearing and sound judgement.
This will be of great benefit to both small businesses and large corporations. Small businesses will grow faster when the dangers of losing their money to fraudsters is removed. With Kleros, they can accept any deal and execute it with the assurance of getting their money once they stick to the agreed terms of contract.
On the other hand, big corporations like amazon, eBay etc will enjoy a reduced operational cost by adopting the Kleros dispute resolution mechanism. Kleros will relieve them of the tedious task of resolving numerous disputes that continuously arise among their customers in the course of carrying out transactions.
A Use Case
John is a program developer with lots of clients all over the world. At a point when the workload became too much, he outsourced a project to David through a 2P2 freelancing platform to develop a mobile application for a client. They live far away from each other in different counties. Their main meeting point was the 2P2 portal. John gave David the projection specifications and they reached agreement on project quality and delivery time.
However, when David finally delivered the job, there was an issue because John was complaining that it fell below the agreed quality. But David would not take any of his complaints. He insisted that what he delivered was what they agreed upon. John understands coding quite well and he knew that sending that poor quality of job to his client could make him lose that client. But David who was supposed to make the necessary corrections had even stopped responding to his messages. John cannot seek legal redress to claim his money back due to distance and time constraints.
Now, supposing this very contract had a clause, stating that if a dispute arises, it would be resolved by KLEROS court. Kleros, being a decentralized blockchain-based court system has a great number of jurors all around the world. Each juror operates on his or her specified area of expertise.
In this case, John simply sends a complaint to Kleros, explaining what transpired between him and David. Kleros' automated court now forwards this complaint to 3 or more jurors, randomly selected amongst numerous others in that field of job. In John’s case, the selected jurors are software experts.
The selected jurors are working together without necessarily knowing each other or having any direct link to each other. Each of them examines the entire contract's process and project quality before voting in favour of whom they think is right. Then they send their reports back to Kleros. At this point, Kleros takes the finally verdict based on the votes from the jurors and sends notification messages to John and David, informing them about the final verdict. Whoever the case favours will have his money refunded by the smart contract.
JOB AT KLEROS
There is an ongoing recruitment exercise on Kleros platform. Kleros is looking for qualified and highly skilled applicants to take up the following positions:
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