Strength and Opportunities:

OATH, unlike some competitors, is blockchain agnostic. This means the success of the OATH protocol is not dependent on the success of a particular public blockchain.

OATH is serving a need that arises based on the emergence of the internet of value and blockchain based business relationships. Once smart contracts get more popular dispute resolution inevitably will become necessary. If OATH can build a user-friendly and highly functional product there is a good chance that the market will adopt it given the fact it is one of the first dispute management solutions.

OATH was able to present a number of partnerships with already established blockchain projects. Besides NEM OATH also announced a partnership with QuarkChain, a blockchain with a distinctive approach towards using sharding technology. QuarkChain is currently among the top 150 cryptocurrencies valued by market capitalization. OATH plans to leverage the communities of their partners for recruiting jurors and for leveraging their own community strength.

Weaknesses and Threats:

OATH is not the only protocol focussed on dispute resolution. Kleros is an alternative blockchain based dispute resolution solution. The Kleros team is already for various years in the space and recently got featured on Epicenter.tv episode 250, where they introduced the team and the concept. OATH does not count with significant distinctive features compared to Kleros in the basic dispute resolution model. OATH tries to serve a big number of use cases. While it may compete with Kleros for traditional dispute resolution, it will compete with Augur, when it comes to verify outcomes of oracle services. At the same time it will compete with Aragon for delivering the best public chain governance solution. This represents a broad number of use cases that are very different from each other. It will be hard for OATH to provide a product that can serve all these use cases very well. On the other hand, none of the mentioned competitors has yet achieved a dominant position. Furthermore, OATH may not need to become the best platform in every market that it serves for the purpose of becoming a flourishing dispute resolution protocol.

Verdict:

The idea presented by OATH protocol is very intriguing, since it solves a problem that the algorithms that run behind the smart contracts of public blockchains can’t solve. OATH may not be the first or the only dispute resolution platform, but their team, investors and white paper are compelling