Kleros Community Update - July 2020

It has been a long six months since our last Community Update and since then, it seems the world has changed and is continuing to flux in the most unpredictable ways.

For us at Kleros, this has been a time to work harder than ever on developing and releasing new products, garnering support for our rising movement, expanding our team and much more.

It has been an exciting first half of the year and here are is our latest news!

Product Pipeline

An important milestone of the past months was the release of Curate. Following the success of our Token Curated List of Tokens (T2CR), we now generalized its principle to enable anyone to empower the community to organize information in a fair and transparent way.

We also finished our integration with Omen, the Gnosis-built prediction market using both Kleros arbitration to resolve market disputes and Kleros Curate to build a list of valid markets which have been community verified.

The next big step in our development pipeline will be the launch of Linguo, a marketplace where users can request and offer translation services backed by Kleros dispute resolution. A test version of Linguo is already on the Kovan network for anyone wishing to test it and submit feedback.

Record Adoption

We are now past the 310 cases mark with 288 cases closed and ruled on with a current 27 open disputes as of 29/7/20.

The amount of money secured by Kleros jurors with Omen, Curate and our other dapps is over $774,627.

For a stats filled rundown of all open cases, juror odds, staked PNK and more, check out this amazing community created dashboard.

Case 302: the Largest Decentralized Trial of All Time

In July, Kleros had its largest trial ever where 511 jurors were drawn in the General Court to adjudicate a case coming from the Omen prediction market: Will there be a day with at least 1000 reported Corona death in the US in the first 14 days of July?

Parties got extremely creative in pleading their case.

Kleros Court ruled in favor of Yes by 367 votes to 126.

A Growing Community

Our community is steadily growing as new Dapps are launched and our message of decentralized justice takes over the world. On the other hand, our project has received global recognition in the past several months through rewards and partnerships.

From an increase in interactions on our Telegram group, an influx of new followers from all parts of the Internet to an increase in the number of drawn jurors, our community is healthy as ever.

The launch of Curate marked another landmark moment for Kleros - we launched our first completely community controlled Storytelling Reward Program, where users can submit their stories of Kleros and get vetted by community members as a method of quality control.

Finally, to celebrate the recent launch of Gnosis' Omen platform—which includes Kleros as an arbitrator—we've started a bounty reward program: incentivizing market creation and liquidity providers to the platform. You may want to check that out, as well.

Decentralizing Governance

As a part of our initiative to give our community a bigger say, we launched the Kleros Governor; a smart contract automatically enforcing all decisions reached through governance. You can check out all the recent proposals on our Forum.

Kleros Guild of Justice

Building upon our experience with the Kleros Fellowship, which is now in its third generation, we established the Kleros Guild of Justice, an informal organization of former Fellows and engaged members of the community with a specific role of spreading the word of Kleros far and wide.

Besides working on raising awareness, Guild members create strong global links to establish Kleros as one of the premier 0nline dispute resolution tools as well as increasing accessibility to our platforms.

European Union Blockchains for Good Prize

On June 30th, it was announced that Coopérative Kleros won the Blockchains for Social Good of the Horizon 2020 award by the European Commission. As part of the award, the Coopérative won €500,000 euros, as well as a prestigious recognition for its quest of decentralized justice.

New Exchange Listings

In the past months, the PNK token has been added to new exchanges including Loopring, Balancer, Kyber Network and Hotbit.

Spreading the Word

The new COVID reality has seen the rise of webinars as a replacement for the conferences in which we usually participated. Here are some of the podcasts and webinars where we participated recently.

Business Development

As mentioned in our last Transparency Report, a key goal for the future is conducting a series of activities in order to foster the use of Kleros. The Kleros protocol targets two main segments: the crypto ecosystem and mainstream institutions.

Kleros in the Ethereum Ecosystem

On the one hand, Kleros is a protocol to which all kinds of Dapps from the Ethereum ecosystem can plug into in order to resolve user disputes in a fair and transparent way. This is, for example, the type of interaction happening between Kleros and Omen, as mentioned above.

At this moment, we have a number of conversations running about integrations with different Dapps from the decentralized ecosystem, some of them in a very advanced stage.

Project Themis: Bringing Kleros to the Mainstream World

Last January, we announced that the Coopérative Kleros was awarded a grant by French bank, BPI for executing Project Themis with the goal of fostering the use of Kleros in enterprise and in institutional use cases.

A part of Themis includes a number of activities for enabling the interoperability of the Kleros protocol with different blockchains. We are currently moving full steam ahead with Themis execution with an integration with the wallet company Defiant from the RSK ecosystem.

Lorens Huculak, a new team member, is conducting thorough research of use cases to build the first Layer 2 company. We are also currently recruiting an integration manager to handle the process of business development and integration management.

New Team Members

Kleros team is expanding and we added some new roles in different areas: development, design and business.

Research Update

On the research front, we continued our work on how to structure Schelling Points for non-binary disputes (for more information on the problems that are present here, see this blog article).

Building on classic results in social choice theory, such as Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, we proved an impossibility theorem which shows that there is no voting system, or an incentive system pair where jurors will always be incentivized to vote in accordance with their honest evaluations.

This result will inform our research going forward on this topic - giving us a better sense of what good properties can be proven, and how one can minimize situations that encourage strategic behavior.

We also dug deeper into our studies of the resilience of Kleros to p+epsilon attacks. Particularly, we developed a better understanding of the conditions under which jurors are incentivized to “counter-attack” against the attack, such as to drain would-be attackers of bribes by appealing decisions up to the point when the attacker can no longer finance the attack.

Financials

In January 2020, the Cooperative conducted a successful token sale. In addition to the BPI grant, the European Commission award, and a very austere management style, this results in solid finances and a comfortable runway moving forward.

To conclude, this has been a good, healthy first half of 2020 for Kleros. Seeing all that we've managed to achieve in these short six months gives us all the energy to proceed with the completion of our envisaged roadmap and nurturing the nascent ecosystem that has sprouted out of the hard work of both our team and our dedicated community.

Where Can I Find Out More?

Join the community chat on Telegram.

Visit our website.

Follow us on Twitter.

Join our Slack for developer conversations.

Contribute on Github.

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