The Kleros/Maker Fellowship on Decentralized Finance

Federico Ast -
The rise in decentralized finance is one of the key trends of the coming age of crypto. As large amounts of capital flow into DeFi protocols, more understanding is needed on how to engage the community in building such protocols in a robust and legally compliant way.

Cooperative Kleros and the Maker Foundation are excited to create the Kleros/Maker Fellow on Decentralized Finance who will conduct research applied to DeFi in the context of Kleros’ Fellowship of Justice.

The Fellow will receive a stipend of 3,000 DAI/month for the 6 month duration of the program.

The research will be conducted fully remote and the candidate is expected to submit monthly progress reports.

Research Topic

In many cases, DeFi protocols decentralize a number of financial services which in some cases have been provided by centralized institutions. In the case of the Maker Protocol, this involves decentralized mechanisms for the creation of a user generated currency with no centralized issuer or administrator, the DAI stablecoin.

In recent times, the MakerDAO community has sought to onboard a larger variety of cryptoassets as collateral to DAI.

This poses a question: how to engage the community in deciding which cryptoassets are acceptable as collateral, while at the same time preserving and enhancing the efficiency and security of the protocol?

Assets ought to comply with a number of code, risk and legal stipulations in order to be deemed secure. Another key aspect is that the decision making process has to be decentralized.

Kleros is a decentralized decision making protocol capable of producing transparent and fair decisions in a wide number of situations. A key use case of Kleros is to act as a decentralized verification (or vetting) mechanism for the compliance of cryptoassets with required conditions. This mechanism has already been used with great success in both decentralized listing processes (Ethfinex) and the curation of tokens for DEXs such as Uniswap.

The Kleros/Maker Fellow will be expected to develop a framework for assessing the compatibility of cryptoassets acceptable as DAI collateral. Such framework should address features such as code, risk profile and legal compliance.

Based on this framework, the Maker community should be able to assess whether any specific cryptoasset complies with the required conditions to be acceptable as a collateral to DAI.

What We Expect

We expect the Fellow to:

  • Submit a high quality report at the end of the six month program. The report should include concrete and actionable guidelines which would enable the community to assess whether any specific cryptoasset complies with the conditions to become a DAI collateral.
  • Contribute insights from her/his research to the MakerDAO forum.
  • Give a brief presentation of the findings in the MakerDAO Governance and Risk call.

Profile

The ideal Fellow is a securities and/or finance specialist with experience in cryptoassets and with an understanding of how MakerDAO and Kleros work.

Stipend

The Kleros/Maker Fellow will receive a stipend of 3,000 DAI/month during the 6 month duration of the program which will be covered both by Coopérative Kleros and the Maker Foundation.

Apply Now

In order to apply to the Kleros/Maker Fellowship, fill this form.

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