The Kleros Fellowship of Justice, 7th Generation: Applications Open!
Apply now and help build the future of decentralized justice!
In August of 2018, we launched the Kleros Fellowship of Justice with the goal of creating a community of experts in the emerging field of decentralized justice.
In this six month-long program, participants from the fields of computer science, cryptoeconomics, law and business collaborate with core members of the Kleros team in conducting some type of work relevant to the advancement of decentralized justice.
Some of the topics of import addressed by Fellows from previous cohorts are:
- Kleros: A Socio-Legal Case Study Of Decentralized Justice & Blockchain Arbitration by Luis Bergolla.
- Interactions between decentralized justice and artificial intelligence by Alexei Gudkov.
- Recognition and enforcement of Kleros awards under The New York Convention in developing areas by Jake Lowther.
- Accommodating Kleros as a decentralized dispute resolution tool for civil justice systems: theoretical model and case of application by Mauricio Virues.
- Dispute resolution in P2P renewable energy markets by Mauricio Duarte.
- Kleros for copyright disputes in digital environments by Paolo Archila.
In the coming, seventh cohort of the Fellowship, Kleros will disburse a number of grants for specific lines of research related to content moderation, policy drafting, mainstream dispute resolution, artificial intelligence, prediction markets, governance and cryptoeconomics.
Candidates will be accepted into the Fellowship based on the quality of their proposal. $1,000 in PNK will be paid to candidates upon the successful completion of the program.
Fellowship Tracks
Content Moderation
The goal of this track is to research applications of decentralized justice in content moderation for social media.
This includes research about better cryptoeconomic designs for such systems and the study of new use cases for decentralized content moderation for account suspensions, deletion of material and fake news/trusted source alerts, among others.
Kleros Moderate is the latest product which involves the use of Kleros for content moderation decisions.
Policy Drafting
The goal of this track is to improve the drafting of policies used in Kleros courts from a mixture of legal and behavioral economic perspectives. Effective policy writing should consider both establishing of robust frameworks and the psychology of users in interpreting these policies, which can lead to the creation of Schelling points.
Research in the policy track may address several issues pertinent to court policy, such as analyzing how jurors have interpreted past policies, soliciting feedback on how jurors may interpret alternative policies, or investigating and designing juror qualification criteria for courts that require specific subject-matter expertise or geographical presence.
Mainstream Economy
In addition to its role as a decentralized court for Web3 applications, Kleros can also serve as a potent tool for resolving disputes in the mainstream economy. Various opportunities exist in industries as diverse as insurance, social media, cryptocurrency exchanges, and online marketplaces in Web2 settings.
The goal of this track is to study the specific technical, legal, and business challenges that arise from the interfaces between mainstream applications and the Kleros protocol and propose ways to overcome them.
A presentation by Federico at EthCC in 2019 on specific opportunities and challenges of mainstream use cases of Kleros.
Prediction markets
Prediction markets are tools for pooling information from the crowd with the goal of making forecasts with applications ranging from risk management to governance.
Dispute resolution in prediction markets can be challenging due to the unique nature of these markets, where participants bet on the outcomes of future events. Some of the specific challenges include ambiguity in event outcomes, manipulation or conflicts regarding the reliability of oracles.
The goal of this track is to research ways in which decentralized justice systems can help resolve various types of disputes arising from prediction markets.
A famous Kleros case was a dispute in the context of a prediction market on the 2020 US election.
Artificial Intelligence
The future of dispute resolution will be determined by a combination of artificial intelligence and crowdsourced methods. However, there is still a high degree of uncertainty regarding how these technologies will interact.
The goal of this track is to study various ways in which AI can be integrated with decentralized justice to design more robust and reliable dispute resolution systems.
For example, one approach might involve a dispute system design where AI tools are employed to make initial decisions or handle relatively straightforward cases, while human jurors in Kleros are tasked with addressing complex or controversial cases. Alternatively, research could focus on the use of decentralized justice in order to correct biases in algorithms.
Mediation
Even though decentralized justice is typically presented as an arbitration tool, it also has other applications in the context of mediation and the so-called med-arb processes.
A notable case is a new methodology we recently proposed called the Kleros Mediation Bridge.
The goal of this track is to produce research that fosters the adoption of Kleros in the context of mediation procedures. This could include the extension of the Kleros Mediation Bridge to a wider range of industries and use cases as well as methods and techniques for distilling party disputes into binary or ranked choice options.
A presentation by Federico and Rob Dean on the Kleros Mediation Bridge.
Insurance
The explosion of the DeFi ecosystem has witnessed an expanding number of services and protocols claiming to provide decentralized insurance. However, these decentralized insurance services operate in a void of confusion and uncertainty, thereby limiting their attractiveness for widespread adoption among DeFi users.
The traditional insurance industry has evolved over centuries to avoid some of the common pitfalls of operating in such a risky area, such as by adopting minimum liquidity ratios, standardized interpretation and contracting practices, and dispute resolution procedures.
The purpose of this track is to ascertain and develop use cases for Kleros to integrate with the DeFi insurance ecosystem, including adopting functions like operating as an oracle to ascertain whether a specific insured event has occurred or to interpret DeFi insurance terms within the complex technical and crypto-economic environment in which they operate.
The track would also be relevant for those with expertise in the insurance industry to contribute to DeFi insurance policymaking.
To gain more insight into Kleros in decentralized insurance, feel free to take a look here.
DAO Governance
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are innovative structures that use blockchain technology and smart contracts to facilitate decentralized decision-making and governance. While DAOs offer many advantages, they also face several challenges, including lack of legal recognition, decision-making complexities and other governance problems.
The goal of this track is to research specific and actionable strategies to implement decentralized justice systems could be used to improve governance procedures and outcomes in DAOs. This includes better navigating the complex landscape of legal recognition, streamlining their decision-making processes, and bolstering their security and trust mechanisms.
This presentation by Jimmy Ragosa at EthCC in 2021 can give you some ideas on how to apply concepts of decentralized justice in DAO governance.
Cryptoeconomics
The goal of this track is to research the cryptoeconomic effects that one could expect from the Kleros protocol in its current state. Additionally, we aim to investigate potential improvements to the Kleros protocol, particularly those that would align with the upcoming version of the protocol.
Notably, as the next version of the Kleros protocol is designed to be modular, allowing for different voting and incentive systems in various courts, it is intriguing to explore specific use cases of Kleros that might benefit from new voting and incentive systems.
Further relevant research could examine the integration of soulbound tokens into the Kleros protocol to facilitate juror selection that considers jurors' credentials. This could involve requirements for jurors to hold specific credentials or employing a method that ensures the presence of jurors with a range of relevant credentials.
Key research questions in this context include designing soulbound token-based juror selection systems and understanding how this social layer may interact with the existing cryptoeconomic mechanisms and security guarantees of the Kleros protocol.
Furthermore, it is interesting to contemplate novel schemas that could be integrated into the Kleros protocol, leveraging cryptographic tools like zero-knowledge proofs to provide advantages such as enhanced user privacy and confidential voting.
For example, one could investigate how social information related to soulbound tokens used by the Kleros protocol can be made compatible with juror privacy through the use of zero-knowledge proofs. Moreover, one could explore methods for Kleros to encrypt relatively confidential information presented as case evidence while still remaining consistent with the crowdsourced nature of the Kleros protocol.
To learn more about Kleros's cryptoeconomic research challenges, read our Yellow Paper.
This presentation by Kleros director of research, William George, can give you some ideas about the type of research to conduct in the cryptoeconomics track of the Kleros Fellowship.
Want to apply but your interest doesn't fall in any of these categories?
The Fellowship also accepts candidates from other lines of research in law, business and computer science.
On this page, you can access the research produced by participants of the previous editions of the program.
Why join the program? Check this post with a number of testimonials from previous participants.
The application process is open for the seventh edition! Apply now!