Kleros Development Roadmap

Building the Future of Decentralized Justice

By Federico Ast and Clément Lesaege

Kleros’ token sale is under way. The support of the community is critical to move forward with our vision of decentralized justice. But what’s ahead after the sale? These are the milestones in our development roadmap.

July, 2018: Launch on Main Net and Early Pilots

In July, we will launch Kleros on the main net and conduct our first pilots. In the early tests, jurors will have real economic incentives but there will not be real enforcement of rulings.

The goal is to analyze user behavior in a controlled setting and understand how Kleros’ cryptoeconomic mechanism is able to deliver decisions in a fast, affordable and secure way.

Early pilots will be based on the curated list use case of Kleros. They are intended to solve simple disputes with Yes/No answers in cases where there is no need for parties to submit evidence. The first test will be a curated list of dogs. We want to see if Kleros can prevent other images (e.g., cats) from being published into the list.

October, 2018: First Version with Real Enforcement.

In October 2018, we will release a version of Kleros able to solve real disputes with real money at stake. Partners will be able to plug into Kleros to adjudicate simple disputes. The ability to ‘bolt on’ Kleros to existing platforms is one of our key areas of expansion. We have already seen a good amount of interest from established platforms in the ecosystem to use our dispute resolution protocol. To learn more, read about our partnerships with Ink Protocol and Dether.

Kleros’ vision is to provide fast, affordable and secure arbitration for many use cases in the decentralized ecosystem.

April, 2019: Multiple subcourts and governance mechanism release.

Kleros is a multipurpose court system able to adjudicate different types of disputes. In the early days, there will be a high involvement of the team in the creation and management of subcourts where disputes are adjudicated. But the goal is to build a decentralized system to be self-managed by users with a liquid democracy governance mechanism.

In April 2019, we plan to launch a version where users are able to vote for the creation of subcourts, the development of subcourt policies and the determination of arbitration fees.

Kleros will use a governance system based on liquid democracy.

July, 2019: Abstraction Release

Abstraction is the process of removing details to computer science objects while keeping common features. The Arbitrable contracts are already abstracted.

In this release, we will abstract most of the elements of Kleros: the subcourts, the governance mechanism (which will allow subcourts to use different governance mechanisms), the juror selection mechanism (which will allow subcourts with whitelisted jurors or requiring the jurors to fulfill some other criteria), the token redistribution mechanism (which will prepare Kleros for the next milestone) and the forking mechanism.

The abstraction of elements within Kleros will facilitate companies to use our protocol and contribute to the creation of a decentralized justice ecosystem.

September, 2019: Complex Disputes Release

Currently, Kleros disputes are ruled using a “first-past-the-post” voting system. While this method is suitable for binary cases (either party A or party B wins), many disputes have more than two parties and solutions that are not binary (e.g., party A wins 75%, party B wins 25%).

This release will add more complex voting mechanisms into Kleros allowing to solve more general disputes including those between more than two parties. Also, while we are working on a price oracle that is compatible with first-past-the-post voting (see this article) which we hope to have implemented before, this release will allow Kleros to be used for more general oracles.

Creating proper incentives for those use cases is an active topic of cryptoeconomic research and the methods chosen will depend on the result of this research. To learn more, read this post we published some months ago about our research roadmap.

Nicolas de Condorcet (1743–1794) was a French philosopher, mathematician and political scientist. He developed a voting system known as the Condorcet method which selects the candidate who would beat each of the other candidates in a run-off election. Some of our current research ideas are based on Condorcet’s work.

Future Releases

In September 2019, Kleros will be at a quite advanced development stage and we expect it to start becoming a common method for arbitration. Future releases will be decided by the team in the best interest of the project. Such decisions will rely heavily on new opportunities discovered through user feedback.

Other releases will be about scaling. But since they depend on the development of third party solutions (such as Plasma, Truebit, Generalized Side Channels and efforts to scale the Ethereum blockchain itself), part of the timing is out of our control.

It is important to state that this roadmap is tentative. Iterations can be shorter or longer. The main priority is security. While we always try to produce updates as fast as possible, we will prefer delaying a milestone rather than shipping an insecure product.

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