1. Overview
What does the company/project do?
Oath Protocol is a standard blockchain governance and dispute resolution protocol. It provides a layer 2 cross-chain infrastructure that can be built into public chains and dApps, and it uses a decentralized juror community to participate in decision-making on the blockchain.
Oath Protocol is modeled on the common law jury system and uses settings and algorithms to ensure that the jurors are selected from a diverse pool (the characteristics and number of jurors can be set by the parties) and do not serve on more than one jury together. Jurors’ identities are concealed from the parties. Oath Protocol will take small part of arbitration fee as a revenue source, and jurors who make the right decision will take the rest as a reward. Overall, Oath Protocol provides a governance solution for the disputes and situations that cannot be predefined in smart contract.
What are the tokens used for and how can the token value appreciate?
OATH is an ERC-20 (Ethereum-based) token that facilitates engagement among participants on the platform as its internal currency. Users (partner dApps and chains) will need to deposit an agreed-on amount of OATH tokens to initiate the protocol. To earn OATH tokens, the platform users will need to contribute to dispute resolution or other community services or run nodes. They can also earn rewards for voting for the winning party. This token economy is comparable to Augur.
Jurors on the platform will be incentivized to hold OATH tokens to increase their credit level (which increases rewards), decreasing the total token supply on secondary markets. As more decentralized applications use Oath Protocol for dispute resolution on their platforms, the market capitalization and value of the token may increase with increased demand and decreased supply.
How advanced is the project?
OATH’s white paper contains comprehensive information about the project, and the one pager provides a more condensed overview. The team keeps growing its Medium page with updates and in-depth articles. It has already demonstrated ability to effectively attract partners and investors to the platform.
NEM is one of their partners that will use Oath Protocol as the default dispute resolution protocol on its platform. Presently, NEM is among the top 20 leading cryptocurrencies measured by market capitalization. Recognized financial media outlets such as Yahoo Finance and newsbtc.com released several high level, impressive press coverage about Oath Protocol. The Oath MVP is expected to launch in late 2018, ahead of schedule.
2. Team
The international Oath founding team performs an essential role as the project’s engine.
Co-founder & CEO: Yin Xu. Yin has over 10 years of experience building successful web projects and 5+ years leading tech teams. He studied Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin, and is a former engineer at the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation.
Co-founder & COO: Jenny Vatrenko. Jenny was from Heyi Blockchain Advisory Group and spent six years at Boies Schiller Flexner — one of the top litigation firms in the US. She has a Juris Doctor degree from Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC.
Co-founder & Head of Engineering: Hongwei Wang. Hongwei is former senior engineer at Google. He has over a decade of engineering and development experience, having worked on developing one of the first Weibo websites in China, jiwai.com.
Co-founder: Will Zhang. Will graduated from the Institute of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Peking University and has a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He founded and led several other digital and tech companies.
Other essential contributors of the team are in charge of graphic design, quantitative modelling, content management, and business development, and are graduates of Oxford University in UK, Columbia University in New York, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Konstanz University in Germany.
The members of Oath Protocol advisory board:
Jia Tian. Software Development Engineer at Pony.ia, Chief Scientist for Cortex Labs, Scientist for Blockchain DATA Foundation.
Huawei Kong. Director of the Institute of Computing Technology in Shanghai, Partner at Qidian Capital.
Xiahong Lin. Founder & CEO of Bodhi Prediction Market, Partner at Continue Capital. David Hong. Senior Foreign Counsel at King & Wood Mallesons, Founder and Director of Business Development at Heyi Blockchain Advisory.
Dafeng Guo. Co-founder of EOS Asia, Co-founder and CTO of Strikingly.
Rui Zhang. Co-founder and General Counsel of NAD Grid Corp.
Zainan Zhou. Senior Software Engineer Tech Lead at Google, Ethereum Core Contributor. Annetta Li. Managing Director at Immensinc Digital Branding, Partner at A’Creative Media Marketing.
3. Product
Oath Protocol has several competitive advantages over its competitors: decentralized community decision making, semi-decentralized voting process, layer 2 protocol, algorithms and safeguards to ensure fairness, compatibility with any public chains or dApps, credit level system and data analytics, scalability and tiers, and transparency.
From a technical perspective, via APIs, Oath Protocol is compatible with any chains or dApps, and its smart contract template library (with templates that address a variety of use cases and come with built-in Oath dispute resolution and governance protocol) allows for easy integration.
Oath Protocol has a wide range of potential use cases which includes: p2p e-commerce, news verification (also applicable to any content-sharing platform), blockchain-based insurance coverage, blockchain-based rental agreements, and outcomes for oracle platforms. It could even apply to some real-life security cases such as the DAO hack & Ethereum hard fork, EOS’s unsuccessful attempt at blockchain governance, and the newest EOS dApp EOSBets hack.
4. Strength and Opportunities
Oath Protocol’s credit level system and token reward mechanism incentivize good-faith decisionmaking and protect the ecosystem from bots and bad actors. Oath will also collect and analyze data relating to jurors’ behavior to enable its selection algorithms to select the best groups of jurors for cases. Through its combination of the credit level and juror data, Oath can provide the best and most reliable arbitration services for all kinds of use cases.
Oath is blockchain-agnostic, which means that its success is not dependent on the success of a particular public blockchain. With traditional businesses’ move toward decentralization, combined with blockchain technology and adoption of dApps, the need for a governance protocol will only increase. By beating competitors and making strategic partnerships with public chains, Oath Protocol has huge potential to occupy a big share of the market.
Oath Protocol has already managed to establish partnerships with NEM, QuarkChain, U Network, PopulStay, and several others. QuarkChain is a blockchain with a distinctive approach to using sharding technology and is currently among the top 150 cryptocurrencies valued by market capitalization.
Oath Protocol’s strong team and partnership network position it to build a user-friendly product and speed up adoption of public chains and dApps by providing efficient governance and fair dispute resolution.
5. Weaknesses and Threats
There are several competitors working on dispute resolution platforms, like Kleros. The Kleros team has been in the space for nearly a year and was recently featured on Epicenter.tv episode 250, where they introduced the team and the concept. In the basic dispute resolution model, Oath does not have significant distinctive features compared to Kleros.
Oath Protocol may also face competition in the markets for its other use cases. For example, Kleros for traditional dispute resolution, Augur for verifying outcomes of oracle services, and Aragon for public chain governance solution. Serving a wide range of use cases could be a double-edged sword. It may be hard for Oath to provide a product that can serve all these use cases very well. However, none of the mentioned competitors have yet achieved a dominant position. All projects will compete with each other, leaving it to the market to choose the winner.
6. Verdict
The vision of Oath Protocol is that blockchain security should have two layers: cybersecurity and governance. Although the focus tends to be on cybersecurity, regular users encounter user disputes more often than security hacks in their day-to-day usage, making governance just as important as cybersecurity. This is even more true in a decentralized ecosystem that does not (or should not) have centralized arbitration services.
Presently, a decentralized, transparent, and fair dispute resolution system with no conflict of interest is the most important missing piece for blockchain, and Oath Protocol will work as a decentralized third party to arbitrate blockchain disputes. Oath Protocol is not the only project working on a governance protocol, but compared to other protocols with arbitrators or supervising bodies, Oath is based on the jury system, which better represents a decentralized community.
URL: https://oaths.io/
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Source: https://primei.co/oath-protocol-ico-review/
* The information contained in this article is for education purpose only and not financial advice. Do your own research before making any investment decisions.
