Famous Kleros Cases
Kleros Court cases that made history
1/ Case #532 - 2020 US Presidential Election Omen Market
In December 2020, the outcome of an Omen prediction market asking the following question "Will Joe Biden win the 2020 United States presidential election?" was challenged and ended up being ruled by Kleros arbitration. A lively debate occurred in social media around the validity of the market as one side argued that the final result could not be known at the time of market resolution. Case #532 ended with a ruling in favor of the "Yes" option, settling more than $2.5M (at the time) of payouts. Learn all about it by opening the Twitter thread below:
Examples of evidence material:
2/ Case #302 - Number of US COVID Deaths Omen Market
In August 2020, the outcome of an Omen prediction market asking the following question "Will there be a day with at least 1000 reported Corona death in the US in the first 14 days of July?" was challenged and ended up being ruled by Kleros arbitration. A lively debate occurred in social media around this market resolution as different sources for the number of daily Covid deaths were reporting contradictory data. Case #302 ended with a ruling in favor of the "Yes" option, settling more than $2.5M (at the time) of payouts.
The Block Research report on case #302
Learn all about it by opening the Twitter thread below:
Examples of evidence material:
3/ Case #16/#62/#89 - Listing of Baer token on Ethfinex
Kleros Tokens registry was used at the time to curate tokens to be listed on the Ethfinex exchange in a decentralized manner. One of the famous examples of cases originating from this decentralized listing process is the listing of Baer token. This token was rejected because the community was able to prove that the project was a scam:
Their CTO was fake (member of a non-existent group at Oxford University - checked with a phone call),
Suspicious changes to the whitepaper,
Fake social media profiles,
Baer Chain was then classified as a Ponzi scheme by the Chinese government a few months later.
Examples of evidence material:
4/ Case #554 - Registration of Kevin Owocki to Proof of Humanity
Proof of Humanity is a Sybil-resistant list of humans using social vouching and Kleros arbitration to endure no fake/duplicate/incorrect profiles make it into the regisrty. Kevin Owocki, the founder of Gitcoin, submitted his profile into PoH but got challenged because the policy asked for a "front-facing picture" and he provided one where he was looking at an angle from the photograph. Long debates ensued to clarify what a front-facing picture meant and what would an acceptable angle be. The profile was finally rejected but Kevin Owocki was of course able to submit another one and make it into the registry.
Examples of evidence material:
1 hour-long street poll video asking about face angles
5/ Case #82 - Listing of Grid+ token on Ethfinex
Kleros Tokens registry was used at the time to curate tokens to be listed on the Ethfinex exchange in a decentralized manner. One of the famous examples of cases originating from this decentralized listing process is the listing of the Grid+ token. This token was rejected because the community estimated that, even if the project was legitimate, the rules required that the contracts should have been audited by a third party (and Conensys Diligence was not considered a 3rd party as Grid+ was a Consensys-incubated startup).
Examples of evidence material:
6/ Case #92 - "Is this a Doge or a cat in the snow?"
On July 31st 2018, the Kleros protocol was launched on the Ethereum mainnet with a pilot called "Doges on Trial". It was a curated list application that relied on user submissions to create a list of Doge memes. This cryptoeconomic experiment offered a reward of 50 ETH to whoever was able to sneak a cat image into the list.
Towards the end of the experiment, the following image was submitted into the Doges on Trial website. As the image did not get challenged during the initial Challenge Period (24 hours), it was accepted into the list a day after.
Examples of evidence material:
The submitter claimed that this was the image of a cat and requested the 50 ETH reward. It was the opinion of Coopérative Kleros that the submitted image did not comply with the payout policy in the sense that it did not “clearly display” a cat as stated in the rules. Coopérative Kleros and the submitter agreed to settle the dispute using the recently launched Kleros Escrow Dapp and the payment was rejected in the end.
Learn more about this case: https://blog.kleros.io/kleros-vs-cat-in-the-snow-the-escrow-leading-case/
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