Exciting things have been happening here at Kleros since our last update some months ago. We have achieved a number of important milestones in product development, established partnerships, participated in conferences, launched our Early Juror Program, and of course, announced our token sale for May 15.

For a simple overview of Kleros, watch this explainer video.

Token Sale

An important milestone for us was setting the date of our token sale for May 15. We will distribute tokens using the Interactive Coin Offering protocol. It’s a new token sale strategy advocated by Vitalik which aims at a more egalitarian distribution of tokens and guarantees participation to every contributor.

In place of one large token sale, we will have it split into a number of rounds. In the first one, starting on May 15, 16% of the tokens will be sold.

We will announce the next rounds as we reach key milestones in our product and market development roadmap. In the crazy world of ICOs, we want Kleros’ public sale to be a model of fairness, transparency, and accountability.

To find out more, read the announcement in full, this post explaining how the token sale strategy works and visit our token sale website to learn more.

Product Development

The development team formed by Clément, Nicolas, Sam and Enrique is making great progress in our product roadmap.

We already have a proof of concept that you can test for yourself. At this url you can see a contract creation interface for escrowed payments and at this one you can see the interface where jurors rule disputes.

To understand how to use the MVP, watch this explainer video.

The user interface isn’t optimized (it’s a work in progress) but the prototype is functional. Be sure to have MetaMask installed in order to use it.

Read Enrique’s recently published development update here to understand where we are in terms of product development. And of course you can also check our GitHub to keep track of our work. All our code is open source and we have a $2,000 monthly dev bounty for contributors to Kleros’ code base. To learn more about the bounty program, see here.

Partnerships

We have signed two partnerships with prominent blockchain organizations. One of them with Ink Protocol and the other one with Dether. More potential partnerships are in discussion.

Our vision for Kleros is for it to become a multipurpose arbitrator, a platform where all the projects in the decentralized ecosystem can delegate dispute resolution to. The partnerships with Ink Protocol and Dether will allow us to pilot test our technology in e-commerce disputes and token curated lists.

To learn more about the business side of Kleros, read this post.

We envision Kleros to become a dispute resolution layer handling disputes of all the decentralized ecosystem.

Our vision is that platforms can select from different interoperable arbitrators. For this, Clément has proposed the ERC792. The separation between Arbitrable and Arbitrator contracts allows for the possibility to separate the ruling from its enforcement. By implementing this standard, Dapps can easily switch from one arbitration service to another and allow users to choose the arbitration service they prefer.

To learn more about the arbitration standard, read this post.

Kleros Early Juror Program

Partnerships are important for having disputes to arbitrate. But for Kleros to work, we also need users serving as jurors on the platform.

Last week, we launched Kleros’ Early Juror Program with the goal of recruiting early jurors for our upcoming pilots and bootstrapping the network. The program included an airdrop of 5 million PNK, (0,5% of the total supply), the token that users need to deposit in order to be drawn as jurors on the platform.

We were overwhelmed by the community support. The 5,000 available spots were filled in just 14 hours, (we expected that to happen within 10 days).

To learn more about Kleros’ Early Juror Program, read this post.

Kleros Research

Kleros has an innovative approach to dispute resolution. Instead of using traditional arbitration methods, the process is based on cryptoeconomics for generating the incentives for agents to behave honestly.

As far as we know, this type of approach has never been tried before. This is why a key part of Kleros’ success depends on testing and calibrating the mechanism for producing fair rulings. This requires conducting empirical research in order to understand juror voting patterns, identify voting biases and optimize the mechanism design for speed and cost of resolution.

We regularly produce new research material, like this post comparing Kleros’ and Augur’s use of the game theoretical principle of the Schelling Point by Clément and William, Kleros’ cryptoeconomic researchers.

Spreading the Word

During the last months, we have participated in a number of conferences and shows spreading the word about Kleros.

Federico speaking at a panel at Decentralized AI conference in San Francisco. February 2018.

Sam, Enrique, Clément and Federico, after presenting Kleros at the Blockchain at Berkeley Meetup.

This is Clément’s presentation about Kleros at Devcon3 in Cancún. November 2017.

Clément’s presentation on random number generation at Devcon3 in Cancún. November 2017.

Federico presenting Kleros at the ETHCC Conference in Paris. March 2018.