Blue Frontiers Partners with Kleros to Provide Blockchain Justice on Floating Seastead Communities
The companies will work towards integrating decentralised arbitration into the governance of Seastead communities to resolve disputes relating to virtually any product or service.
Kleros is a decision-making protocol which uses blockchain and crowdsourcing for adjudicating claims. The platform connects users who need to solve disputes with jurors who have the skills to fairly settle them. The system relies on incentives backed by the game theoretical concept of Schelling point in order to motivate anonymous jurors to rule cases correctly. Kleros means “chance” in Greek. The system is based in some principles for random jury selection which were known by the Athenians twenty five centuries ago. The result is a peer-to-peer justice system able to solve the disputes of the Internet age in a fast, transparent and inexpensive way.
Residents and visitors of the seasteads will inevitably have disputes. These may relate to property damage, disturbance of peace, or other matters that can be settled without the involvement of the local government. Using smart contracts and Varyon deposits, visitors and residents will be able to use Kleros’ smart contract dispute resolution mechanisms to come to an agreement. Note that this does not prevent the choice to use other dispute resolution mechanisms.
“Our Seasteads are specifically designed to facilitate innovation in how humans choose to model habitation, form community and govern their affairs. By adopting the pioneering objective arbitration protocol developed by Kleros, we will allow our communities and the ecosystems they interact with to settle disputes fairly, securely and efficiently” explained Randy Hencken, Co-Founder of Blue Frontiers and Director of The Seasteading Institute.
The arbitration process that Blue Frontiers will integrate into its Seastead governance frameworks to resolve disputes can be laid out in four easy steps:
- Users transacting within the Seastead ecosystem create a smart contract and use Kleros as the adjudication protocol.
- The relevant information is securely transmitted to the Kleros platform.
- A jury or tribunal is selected from the juror network. They evaluate the case’s evidence and cast their votes.
- The jury’s decision is enforced by the previously written smart contracts, ensuring a just outcome.
Reflecting the model for independence underpinning Blue Frontiers’ Seastead communities, the Kleros project is completely open-source, owned by no one, and is intentionally not backed by any institutional investors. Additionally, the Kleros protocol can also be used for a wide range of disputes decisions requiring technical expertise in for the allocation of resources (real or symbolic) between parties, such as: freelancing, crowdfunding, oracles, gaming, insurance, e-commerce, and many more.
“Kleros can be integrated into almost every type of application built online and will serve as a key institution for dispute resolution in the emerging blockchain era. It will provide a fast, inexpensive, transparent, reliable and decentralized dispute resolution mechanism that renders binding ultimate judgments about the enforceability of smart contracts” said Dr. Federico Ast, CEO of Kleros.
The first Seastead is expected to be completed in 2020 and is planned for French Polynesia. It will be habitable by up to 300 people simultaneously.
