Kleros 2019 Development Roundup

With our new roadmap set before us, we are now continuing the development of Kleros by preparing the Generalized TCR, a translation Dapp named Linguo, a Dispute Resolver tool, as we prepare for our upcoming token sale.

Since Kleros completed its first token sale in early 2018, we launched four platforms on mainnet (Kleros Court, the T2CR, the Escrow and the Realitio-Kleros Oracle). After a revamp of our Court interface, the addition of new badges and rewards, as well as expanding the Kleros Escrow to cover ERC20 token payments and many other minor, but important updates, we completed our initial roadmap.

Since it has been quite a while since our last official development update, we've decided to compile everything we've created and give you a chance to see all in one place.

Without further ado, let’s have a roundup of the developments in Kleros tech this year!

Recent Development

Kleros Athena

After our initial experiment with  Doges on Trial, we spent significant resources to develop a fresh, improved iteration of the Kleros arbitrator. From smart contract and backend infrastructure to user interfaces, Kleros Athena release now presents the only and best dispute resolution solution in the decentralized space. To learn more, have a look here for the details.

New Kleros Court

From the ugly duckling of the Doges on Trial interface to the Kleros Athena, which brought with it significant updates to the protocol itself, we focused next on creating a much more welcoming interface for the Kleros Court.

After several iterations, following the March 2019 update to Athena, we've revamped our UI to look like the image below.

With a much clearer design, Athena truly started looking the part. Of course, user-centered design is something that is always a work in progress and we welcome all feedback. If you'd like to drop some ideas or suggest changes, feel free to join our Telegram and let us know.

To check out all the different changes we implemented during the European summer, you can have a look at this link.

All this was the result of hard work on the application of legal design principles. This fantastic video by our resident designer, Plinio sheds some light on our design process.

Token Curated Registry of Tokens (a.k.a. T2CR)

Ever wonder what it would be like to have a full list of the valid, non-scam Ethereum tokens, but curated in a completely decentralized way? Well, we managed to do exactly that with our T2CR, effectively creating a curated list based on economic incentives.

Kleros T2CR enables the community to have a trustworthy source of information about Ethereum tokens. This registry was used by Ethfinex (today's Deversifi) to curate the tokens for their exchange listings. It currently contains over 330 tokens registered, with over $350.000 deposited through the platform and the list is growing daily.

Escrow

While working on Court improvements, we developed and launched an arbitrable application called Kleros Escrow. It enables the locking of funds in a smart contract, in accordance with an agreement between two parties. The funds are disbursed after the agreement is fulfilled and in case of a dispute, it is resolved efficiently by the Kleros Court.

In the last iteration of the Kleros Escrow, we've added the option of payment with ERC20 tokens, increasing usability and expanding the market the platform is ready to mediate.

In the growing cryptocurrency space, we have gained a truly global and seamless financial system, while smart contracts provide the legal infrastructure for these transactions to happen securely.

With the Kleros Escrow, we have effectively created an extremely useful tool for any kind of trade encompassing off-chain goods and services. To read more about the Kleros Escrow, have a look at this link.

Realitio Integration

In May, we integrated with Realit.io, a platform which allows the user to ask any question with a publicly verifiable answer. Kleros was embedded as the final dispute resolution layer. In case of an ultimate dispute, Kleros jurors would effectively act as an oracle to solve it.

Realitio is an upgrade to WeTrust's flagship application, CryptoUnlocked, which allows the creation of milestone-driven (aka Proof of Impact) fundraising campaigns. It now uses the Kleros Oracle as a last resort oracle for resolving potential disputes.

Check out the article we wrote about Kleros as a Realit.io oracle here for more info.

We have more oracle users coming at the start of 2020, so stay tuned for more announcements soon!

DutchX and Uniswap.Ninja

Thinking about how to apply our ever growing list of tokens, we decided to create a Uniswap front-end for our T2CR, which we aptly named Uniswap.Ninja.

Additionally, we did a similar thing with the DutchX exchange, which you can see here.

Through this implementation of the T2CR, we created a Uniswap and DutchX exchange powered by decentralized token listing.

Simple, yet extremely efficient. Long live decentralization!

Centralized Arbitrator Dashboard

We released the Centralized Arbitrator Dashboard to quickly deploy and operate a centralized arbitrator from a graphical user interface. This serves as a quick demonstration tool or can help debugging for anyone trying to integrate with Kleros.

Token Sale

We implemented a new token sale contract and a web app for the second round of Kleros' Token Sale which will start on 11th of January.  You can see the token sale announcement here.

Upcoming Development

Kleros Governor

Kleros governance is one of the most important elements to be fully decentralized in order to create a system that is governed by the community.

In order to make Kleros completely decentralized, we are getting ready to deploy our own governance contract, the Kleros Governor and its user interface. This will move Kleros to the next stage of its development.

The Kleros Governor smart contract is ready and currently in the bug bounty phase, you can see more info about it here.

Generalized Token Curated Registry

With the resounding success of the initial T2CR, we had a lot of feedback from the community whether our decentralized curation system could be used in different fields, from creating lists of trusted news sources to even creating lists of trusted torrent links.

In order to allow the imagination of our community to become reality, we've developed the Generalized Token Curated Registry. We set out to build a protocol such that a smart contract adhering its rules could be displayed by a user interface that did the same. This way, users can have a single UI to view, submit, challenge items, consume evidence and so on.

The system is in advanced stages of development, so if you'd like to read about it in more detail, Matheus made this nice wrap up for you to have a look.

Linguo

We've been working for some time under the hood of a new translation Dapp named Linguo. It's a decentralized platform in which anyone can submit a document for translation and have it completed by freelancers.

There will be no platform fees and any potential disputes about translation quality will be handled by Kleros jurors.

The translation marketplace will have three types of user roles: translation task submitters, translators and reviewers.

The basic workflow would be that a user submits a task, another user accepts the task and submits the translated text. Then, the task submitter or any other user can review the translation and challenge it if they see it does not fit the requirements. The dispute is, as always, handled by the Kleros jurors afterwards.

Dispute Resolver

We also created Dispute Resolver to let anyone create a dispute easily without developing an arbitrable contract. Simply go over the app, fill out the form and submit your dispute to Kleros Court.  You can then interact with it: submit evidence and contribute to crowdfunded appeal.

Proof of Humanity

How does one create a sybil-resistant identity system? How to stop users from creating multiple accounts using different pseudonyms (or addresses in the case of crypto-networks) to receive rewards multiple times, write fake reviews, you name it?

We've been thinking about this deeply recently and joined forces with the ecosystem-wide community project to create Proof of Humanity, a system combining social verification with video submission in order to create a sybil-resistant list of humans.

The platform is currently in its design phase and we are gathering information and discussing the requirements of the product. Check out the documentation here, while you can also join the dedicated Telegram group exactly covering this topic.

Libraries

Arbitration Standard Tutorials

Since our own development is only a fraction of the Kleros vision, in order to make Kleros more approachable to developers, we created an in-depth guide which explains the ERC-792 and ERC-1497 standards, as well as a guide on how to develop your very own arbitrator and arbitrable contracts.

Interested in playing around with the Kleros protocol? This has never been easier! You can find the tutorials at this link. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions via our Telegram or Slack, we'll be more than happy to help out!

Archon - Ethereum Arbitration Standard API

Kleros is no fun if developers can't interact with everything. In order to allow complete control over the inner workings of our platform, we developed Archon. Archon is a javascript library written to make it easy to interact with Arbitrable and Arbitrator contacts.

In particular, Archon can be used to take care of a lot of the hash validation work that is part of the Evidence Standard (ERC 1497). Archon can be used with all Arbitrable and Arbitrator contracts that follow the ERC 792 standard and has the functionality to interact with all standardized methods.

Have a look at the library at this link for more info.

Conclusion

As can be seen above, we've been quite busy, expanding the scope and depth of Kleros tech, with extremely interesting developments coming just round the corner.

2019 has proven incredibly fruitful in the development of the future of decentralized justice and 2020 is the year where we expand on this and take it firmly into the mainstream.

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.

Download our Book