What we learned bringing decentralized justice to Argentine citizens

Transcript

[music] [music] >> Can you hear me well? Okay. Uh my name is Facundo Trots. I work on legal and policy affairs at Kleros and I would like to tell you uh a short story. So in Argentina uh you may know Argentina because it's the land of the goat Lionel Messi. Um there's a small city called Junin um where citizens are using Ethereum without knowing it.

Um so let's take Alice for example. She has a complaint a dispute with a company and she files uh a complaint with the consumer protection office of Junin. Until recently she uh will wait six months if the company refused to settle. But now they they wait only one week. And the reason of this is Kleros.

So Kleros uh is a decentralized dispute resolution protocol built on Ethereum that uses game theory and cryptoeconomic incentives to uh randomly select jurors and coordinate them towards finding the right answer for a dispute. So these jurors need to stake on a particular court and they are randomly selected. They vote. They explain their reasons and uh they get paid for their work.

Uh those that vote inconsistently that do not follow the rules are generally um uh penalized for for this behavior and those that vote correctly they are rewarded. So how do we fit into a consumer um case? So, Alice files the complaint. Uh, then if the hearing doesn't go well, there's a Kleros jury that will be randomly selected and they will issue a resolution. They will solve this particular case.

For now, the office still retains the authority to review and override resolutions, but this is more or less how it works. But the challenge was, how do we feed this into an open and public, you know, how do we fit an open public protocol into a legal procedure? So, one of the challenge we faced was, well, the office told us, hey, I don't I don't want a bunch of anons deciding cases. In this case is in this particular case, we want them to be lawyers.

So, what we did is we uh built gated courts in which only uh certified lawyers can be drawn uh and they prove this by using uh a soul bound token that is a non-transferable credential that proves that this particular juror is a lawyer. Challenge number two, privacy. Uh, this is where I would say there's a kind of alignment between data protection regulations and the P in crops. Uh, so this is actually good.

There's a lot of challenges in terms of how do we apply traditional privacy laws to this kind of technology, but at least the goal is clear. Uh, some of the learnings. So, governments want a service. They don't want a protocol. They want a full service. They want a visible team, someone they can call. Uh, and this is a challenge because this means that you could create a you know, a potential central point of centralization and there might be some some initial dependencies, uh but you require a clear roadmap towards progressive decentralization if you don't want to risk becoming this just another, you know, service provider.

Another thing is start small. Start local and low stakes. So what we did is first we started using a non-binding non-binding layer. So first the Kleros resolution is not binding, is advisory. And then start talking with municipalities, you know, instead of govern big governance, right? It's easier to get a municipality to issue a resolution than to get a Congress to issue a law. And then what I what we are, you know, looking into the future is how do we remove this this small dependencies, the trust that we still we still ask for. So basically

there are two places in which we still rely on trust that that is on evidence storage. We use a encrypted data room, but we would like to move forward and, you know, we are looking into independent verifiable evidence storage and also trusted execution environments as well as CK proof for issuing the credentials. So if you are building anything that has to be with this, anything that could help us achieve these goals, please reach out to us and thank you for listening.

Okay. So maybe I can answer the first one. So given that Kleros is built on Ethereum, it uses smart contract and also given that Kleros the way it's built it's really cheap, it's really fast and all the process being on chain means that you can verify who the jurors are, that no one manipulated the process, that no one tampered the evidence. Uh, and given that we remove some intermediaries in the process, this means also that it will be super fast and and uh

in more efficient than traditional justice. That I will say will be the short answer to the first question. Um maybe the second one I'm not sure if I'm qualified to answer this one, so maybe I will go uh what is the one one of the reason okay. Can this system be replicated in other cities from all about all over the world? How? This is a great question and one of the the things we do when we work with governments is uh we need to take a look at the actual framework and this might be different from you know city to another city, it may be different from country from one country to another. So uh it depends really. It depends on uh on the existing

framework. It also depends on what the what the authorities are willing to change for uh to accommodate to a system like Kleros. Um and I will say that's it because I don't have more time, but if you have any more questions please please reach out to me after after this talk. >> [laughter] >> Thank you. >> [music]