Kleros Community Update #1 — Token Sale, Product Launch and Much More!
Kleros’ team has been up to a lot during the past few months…
Wow! Lots have been going on in the past few months since the last community update in April. None less than a token sale using an innovative method and our product launch on Ethereum Mainnet.
The First Interactive Coin Offering Ever
A big milestone for the past months was successfully conducting our token sale. The sale launched live on stage during Consensus 2018 pitch final in New York City on May 15th and closed on July 15th, precisely during the first half of the World Cup final between France and Croatia (no, we did not plan it that way, but were quite happy as Kleros’ founders Clément and Nico are French!).
Kleros was the first project ever to use the Interactive Coin Offering (IICO), a new method suggested by Vitalik and Jason Teutsch to make token sales more fair and egalitarian (to learn more, read this post). As the first project to have ever conducted an IICO, we ourselves developed the smart contact and interfaces. Want to learn about the process? Read our post about how we wrote the smart contract for the sale and some lessons we learned along the way by building a production ready Dapp.
So, what about the results of the sale?
Over 200 members of the community contributed 5794 ETH for 160,000,000 PNK, 16% of the total supply of the project token (further sale rounds will be conducted in the future, as we achieve critical milestones). To learn more about contributor behavior in the first IICO ever, take a look at this piece by Kleros’ cryptoeconomic researcher William George. If you want to buy PNK, they are currently available at decentralized exchanges such as IDEX and Ether Delta.
Launch on the Mainnet: Doges on Trial
Just two weeks after the end of the sale, we launched Kleros on the Ethereum Mainnet. The Doges on Trial experiment is a curated list use case where Kleros jurors have to decide whether a picture submitted by users is a doge or not. Read the announcement post for a general description of the pilot and a detailed explainer on how the experiment works.
The goal of Doges on Trial is to test the cryptoeconomic model underlying Kleros with real users and real economic incentives (to learn more about the model, read our white paper). Is Kleros able to generate the right incentives for jurors to rule cases honestly? Is the platform resistant to attacks by malicious agents? These are some questions we seek to answer.
Doges on Trial may look like a “silly” experiment. But information on user behavior collected during the tests will open the door to many fascinating Kleros applications in the realm of curated lists, including content moderation in decentralized social media, product listing in e-commerce platforms and token listings in decentralized exchanges among many others.
Want to try Kleros? Use the pilot as a submitter from this interface, and as a juror from this one (make sure you have your Web3 browser enabled. If you don’t know how to do that, we’ve prepared this tutorial to help you).
Spreading the Word
A large part of our work at Kleros involves educating the public about decentralized justice, which we do by speaking at conferences, participating in podcasts, writing articles and discussing on our Telegram group. These are some of the highlights of the last couple of months.
- A great article by William explaining how Kleros’ cryptoeconomic model works and why it needs a native token.
- Some people usually make an objection along the following lines: “What if the majority of the jury is not qualified and/or they end up voting in a biased way?”. Usually, this objection comes with a reference to the courtroom drama film 12 Angry Men, where a majority of jurors were ready to wrongly sentence a man to death based on laziness to evaluate evidence and racial biases. Could Kleros end up as a tool to enforce majoritarian mob justice? In this awesome post, William tackles this concern.
- Kleros, which means “randomness” in Greek, is based on a very old form of government called demarchy. Random selection was used in Classical Athens the early republics of Renaissance Venice and Florence of the Renaissance and it was even seriously debated by the Founding Fathers of the United States in the days of the drafting of the Constitution.
- Want to learn more about Kleros as governance innovation? Read this post I published in the prestigious blog of the London School of Economics where I argue that Kleros can be seen as a new governance model for decentralized organizations, alongside futarchy and liquid democracy.
- Another fascinating use case of Kleros is as dispute resolution mechanism for oracles. Read this article by William about this application. This is connected to our partnership with decentralized derivatives market platform MARKET Protocol.
- Want to know more about our partnerships? Take a look at the announcement of our collaboration with seastead community building Blue Frontiers.
- You may be wondering how we will achieve all these use cases. Read our ambitious roadmap going forward, both in the development and the research side.
- And if you’re wondering who are the people building this cool technology, we’ve started a series of interviews with our team. members. Meet Kleros’ CTO and chief architect, Clément Lesaege; our cryptoeconomics researcher, William George; and our Communication Lead, Stuart Jackson.
The Community
A huge part of Kleros is the growing community of amazing people who believe in a future of decentralized justice. Let’s see some samples of the creative power of Kleros’ community.
Discussions in our Telegram are always a great source of inspiration for new content. Of course, during the World Cup, we had passionate conversations about football, which eventually derived into a post where we imagined how to use Kleros as a crowdsourced football referee: the CrowdVAR.
Want to take part in high level discussions about blockchain and the future of law? Come to our Telegram group and be a members of our very active community of developers, lawyers, crypto enthusiasts and generally speaking, all people passionate about the future of law.
The Team is Growing
Kleros is growing and we’re looking to bring more talent on board our outstanding team. We have a number of open positions as Marketing Manager, Community Manager, Full Stack Developer, Cryptoeconomics Intern, and lead technical positions for the implementation of our use cases of Escrow, Curated Lists and Oracles for our growing number of partners. And, of course, an Office Manager to make sure that operations run smoothly.
We’re a distributed team of people passionate about decentralization, blockchain, law and justice. We’re deeply committed to building a very cool technology with the potential to positively impact millions in the long run.
So, these are just some of the developments which happened in the past couple of months. No less than the first Interactive Coin Offering ever and the launch of Kleros’ on the mainnet, among others.
If you want to know about how development is going, there are so many updates that they didn’t fit into this post. We will soon publish a post fully dedicated to dev updates (in the meantime, you can check our GitHub).
Thanks for being part of our community and for your support in building the future of justice!
Join Kleros!
Join the community chat on Telegram.
Visit our website.
Follow us on Twitter.
Join our Slack for developer conversations.
Contribute on Github.
