Ahhhhh... Kleros Court, this is a project from the earlier idealistic days of Ethereum... when blockchains and decentralisation were synonymous with idealistic goals about changing the infrastructure of social and political structures and not as a way to ape into the latest 10000000000% APR rug-pull.

Kleros was (is...) an attempt to create a decentralised jury system, where applicants could submit cases to be arbitrated by jurors who would be staked into various technical and non-technical courts. Of course, due to the fact that there is no binding laws that can be enforced, it is designed on as an mutually agreed upon arbitration between the two opposing parties.

It is something that does pretty well for low level arbitration as long as the two parties agree to be bound by the result... and it does form the template for something that could evolve into more idealistic and wider ranging applications. Interestingly enough, it is a project that did receive some backing from the UN as a potential way of mediating disputes.

It is something that I had an interest in, as a naïve optimist/idealist (with a slightly pragmatic streak....). So, I joined up to it (like many early projects) to see if it was something that could possibly evolve into something really quite earth-shattering. Sadly, it hasn't yet achieved its potential, but it is still running and arbitrating cases.

Like many non-financial projects, the rise of Ethereum gas fees really stifled the uptake and usage of Kleros. All the judgements are done one chain, and so high fees really stifle the participation by a large number of people. Wide participation is the backbone of a decentralised jury system... if you only get a select bias of people taking part (those who can afford the gas fees), then you are not getting an impartial and representative judgement.

It appears that many potential jurors had been turned away by the high gas fees over the last year, and at the beginning of the year Kleros instituted a new yearlong airdrop (until the end of 2021) of the PNK token for people who stake to join a court. Even better, those who had staked to a court before the airdrop started in 2021 got a nice retrospective lump sump! I can't say this often enough, I love the retrospective airdrops that rewards the people who try and back a project before it gets the attention of the free token seekers... it is a good way of rewarding the people who have aligned visions and interests with a particular project, which is especially important if your token also has some form of governance use case as part of its intrinsic value.

What I had noticed in my year-long absence from the Kleros court was the fact that the some of the courts were receiving and adjudicating a larger amount of cases... whereas the ones that I had originally signed up to were receiving less. Given that jurors are selected at random, the lower case count was leading to almost no cases to judge upon!

Looking at the log of recently judged and ongoing cases, I saw that the most active non-technical court was the Humanity Court. Essentially, this is a court that arbitrates on whether or not the supplied documentation lines up with a stated unique person or not. So, I figured I may as well stake PNK in order to be considered for this court...

I will have to look up and research a bit more the technical ones (the translation courts are out of my area of knowledge...), some of them are possible for me to do, but given that you are rewarded or slashed depending on how your vote aligns with the majority judgement, you want to be sure that you can actually do a good job!

So, that is another little thing that you can think about doing when the gas fees on Ethereum are back to regular low levels. All the on-chain smart contract interactions are now worthwhile again... and it is time for the old idealist projects to shine again!

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