About

Kleros is a decentralized dispute resolution protocol for use on smart contract platforms, which has been implemented on Ethereum. It acts as a decentralized third party that provides accurate outcomes and decisions to a variety of cases ranging from simple to highly complex.

History

In June of 2017, the first white paper for Kleros, founded by Federico Ast (CEO), Clement Lesaege (CTO), and Nicolas Wagnerm, was released. Prior to its mainnet launch, Kleros joined the Thomson Reuters incubator. Kleros participated in a public sale of its ERC-20 token, PNK in July 2018. 160,000,000 PNK were sold, or 16% of the total supply, for 5,800 ETH.

Kleros aims at bringing justice and individual freedom among smart contract disputes through its arbitration service. Kleros claims that smart contracts may be able to execute programs but they are not capable of rendering subjective judgements or including elements from outside the blockchain. Kleros solves this by introducing incented jurors who rule on contract disputes. The more PNK a juror stakes, the more likely they are to be selected. Beyond selection, PNK incentivizes jurors to be honest. A juror whose vote does not agree with the ultimate decision pays part of their staked PNK to “coherent voters” who voted in favor of the majority accepted outcome. PNK is also used for platform governance.

In 2019, Kleros added new products: Escrow and Oracle. Each of these products utilizes Kleros’ main service as a dispute resolver for subject conflicts. Escrow is a dapp that can be used for any exchange of goods, assets, or services involving an Ethereum-based asset. Oracle delivers a subjective oracle solution able to answer absolutely any question with a publicly verifiable answer.

Following a second PNK token sale earlier in 2020, Kleros announced its new product, Curate, on July 12, 2020. Curate can be used to create open curated registries using financial incentives and Kleros dispute resolution technology to ensure a list is compliant to the predefined acceptance criteria. On March 12, 2021, Kleros launched its most recent product: Proof of Humanity. Proof of Humanity is a social identity system for users of Ethereum. The system aims at combining social verification with video submission in order to create a Sybil-proof list of humans.