Jur’s debut: the token of justice (JUR) is on public sale from 28th August

DISCLAIMER

> If you want to check the JUR token allocation, directly jump to the section: 4. The Raise!

Table of Contents:

1. Introducing Jur

After more than a year and a half, Jur has matured and is now approaching the public sale. That’s why we decided to write an extended article over the genesis, story, aim and final goals of the project. It’s a long read, but we hope it will be comprehensive enough for you to properly understand all about Jur.

Happy reading!

The state of the industry

Over the last six years, the blockchain industry has rapidly developed. After many experiments, it has become clear that the next step will be that of real adoption throughout business and everyday life.

It all began with the introduction of the concept of ‘smart contracts’ in 2014. In the years to follow, a wide array of blockchain-related speculation was raised in the legal world.

The ‘legal technology’ sector has seen a rise of 713% growth in 2018, with over $1.6 billion invested, a skyrocketing phenomenon that has recently caught the interest of Silicon Valley, amongst others.

Source: 713% Growth: Legal Tech Set An Investment Record In 2018, Forbes

The legal market leaves a tremendous amount of gaps to be fulfilled, and this is where technology comes into place. Recent estimations have highlighted that trillions of dollars go wasted into inefficient services such as dispute resolutions, while sources such as the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) agree that better legal services are fundamental today for economic growth. We also wrote an article on that one year ago, stating that the world needed better dispute-resolution methods and better contract enforcement.

We still believe it.

Source: Why Enforcing Contract Matters, The World Bank

That’s why in the years to come we will see a proper rise of ‘legal tech’, an emerging trend that will revolutionize the lives of people and businesses alike. The revolution will impact the way we deal with justice and legal in general: in smarter, faster, easier ways than today.

Jur’s bet on the rise of legal tech

Jur is the first project that systematically engages with the legal tech vertical, leveraging blockchain and legal solutions in a global way. The aim is to create breakthroughs and new digital instruments in order to bring the power of smart contracts and blockchain into everyday life, thus revolutionizing the concept of justice.

Jur’s decentralized legal ecosystem. More: www.jur.io

Thanks to blockchain, justice can shift from a centralized system to a decentralized one, while smart contracts will transform a slow and expensive process into one that is inexpensive, reliable, fast and affordable.

Jur mixes these two technologies to deliver a dispute resolution system on a global scale, where decentralization is the fundamental value in order to create transparency, quality and incorruptibility.

Jur’s journey brought the team to meet one of the most interesting players in the blockchain industry today, VeChain, which is a public blockchain building a platform for mass-adoption by businesses. Jur shares VeChain’s same values and mission: to create enterprise-level adoption.

We strongly believe that the VeChainThor Blockchain will be the public blockchain with the most business activity in the world, and we are helping to build a legal, blockchain-based ecosystem to play our part for the entire community and business world in general.

The broken law of today: what is the current problem with the private system of legal justice and why it needs a solution

Before getting into Jur’s solutions, we need to understand how the project was born, and why it is needed. As today’s legal system is broken, there is an urge: not only to repair it — but to upgrade it to an entirely whole new level.

Today, if you want to make a business agreement, you need to do a lot of paperwork (which consumes time and money). All the while, you have no certainty that it will be respected. For this reason, there are dispute resolution systems. These mechanisms are extremely complex and impractical for the average person. For those able to afford it, resolution times for disputes are very slow.

The fundamental legal system upon which any business seeks certainty is broken, because the time and effort needed to make a legally-binding contract is nothing compared to the resources needed to actually enforce it.

Good luck with all that :) Source: Freepik

To make things worse, the legal system that we are talking about is a very large, complex system that can’t simply be changed overnight. “Rome was not built in a day,” they say, and we know that very well. That’s why any possible solution needs to be solved from the perspective of governance.

Jur’s solution: a legal decentralized ecosystem

Jur was born when CEO and co-founder Alessandro Palombo realized that replacing traditional contracts with smart contracts was not enough for the intended purpose of changing the law system. Sure, you can create self-automated contracts with smart contracts, but a judiciary decision by a court is always necessary for having it enforced into the real legal system. That meant that the innovative potential contained within smart contracts was nullified.

A connection within the real law system was necessary. This is where blockchain came into place.

The blockchain offers the technology necessary to create a ‘place’ where people can vote on a dispute between two parties that can’t find an agreeable solution for their controversy.

Traditional alternative dispute resolution systems, called ADRs, although effective, are highly expensive and slow, making them infeasible for most.

Thus, Jur pictured a world where you can easily use all the best parts of an ADR in an online space — a so called ODR. However, Jur wanted to avoid needing the intervention of an easily-corruptible centralized system. To solve this, Jur imagined an ODR that is decentralized — and from this idea the Open Layer came into place.

By giving the power to resolve litigation to a community vote, Jur made a system that had never before been considered: a dODR whose cost of entrance is zero. Cost-effective, fast, and convenient, this system is now an ideal solution for a wide range of business needs. This Open Layer was later attached to the first Smart Contract Editor, the Jur Editor, and that’s how Jur had its first MVP.