Kleros Development Update — March

Published in

Kleros

3 min readApr 6, 2018

The past month has flown by. A lot of exciting things are happening at Kleros and we are busy preparing for our IICO, but we still wanted to keep you up to date on all of our developments. So here we go.

New API Abstractions and Structure

We have been working hard on a major restructuring of the API. Now that the core functionality is implemented, we wanted to take some time to iron things out to allow us and contributors to work more efficiently in implementing new features. We’ve divided the API into three logical parts:

Contract Wrappers: For dealing directly with contracts and other low level logic like deploying or loading a contract from the network.

Abstract Wrappers: For enhancing Contract Wrappers by adding off-chain store functionality and delegating calls to Contract Wrappers dynamically.

Resource Wrappers: Like Abstract Wrappers, but for representing “resources” that interact with or require multiple Contract Wrappers, e.g disputes.

These changes resulted in a nicer folder structure and better coding patterns throughout the codebase.

A Tree of Justice

We’ve also started to work on our first implementation of sub courts. A court system in Kleros is essentially a tree where each node is an Arbitrator contract that has an arbitrary number of children Arbitrator contracts and one parent Arbitrator contract. When you appeal to a node, it will move the dispute to its parent. Nodes can also specify a maximum number of “local” appeals if they want the first X amount of appeals to be handled internally.

We are going to start working on a UI soon where court hierarchies can be built for testing and crypto economic experiments. This will consist of a drag and drop interface where you can connect and disconnect nodes. In the future, this will be handled by the governance system.

Trust Through Transparency in UX

It is our belief that for a system to be transparent, it has to be evidently transparent even to the least technical of our users. A lot of our time in the upcoming weeks will be spent ironing out the user experience of our front ends, making sure they are self explanatory and even educational on everything from the basics of the blockchain to our protocol. We want to provide users a full fledged view into our system and clearly display data provenance and actions and their effects.

You can read more about our guiding principles in this great article by @lyricalpolymath, https://medium.com/@lyricalpolymath/web3-design-principles-f21db2f240c1#f130.

An Open IICO

You might have heard that our ICO is “interactive” (IICO). You can read more about that here . Since IICOs will become a standard going forward, we decided to build a generic UI that can be used with any IICO contract like so, openiico.com/0x….

This will save a lot of time for other companies in the space who choose to have an IICO.

What’s Next?

Finish openiico and share it with the world!
Finalize API patterns and structure.
Publish thorough documentation for the API.
Improve the UX in kleros-juror-front and implement Web3 Design Principles.
Implement appeals on arbitrable payments.

As always, we have a $2,000 monthly minimum dev bounty. Half of it to be paid in ETH and the other half in PNK after the first round of the upcoming token sale.

We track tasks on our github repos’ issues/projects. For more information, join the #dev channel on the kleros-slack.