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Kleros Court cases that made history.

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Case #532 - 2020 US Presidential Election Omen Market

In December 2020, the outcome of an Omen prediction market asking “Will Joe Biden win the 2020 United States presidential election?” was challenged and ended up being ruled by Kleros arbitration. A lively debate occurred on 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. The case ended with a ruling in favor of the “Yes” option, settling more than $2.5M (at the time) of payouts. Read more in this Twitter thread.

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Case #302 - Number of US COVID Deaths Omen Market

In August 2020, the outcome of an Omen prediction market asking “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 on social media around this resolution, as different sources for the number of daily COVID deaths were reporting contradictory data. The case ended with a ruling in favor of the “Yes” option, settling more than $2.5M (at the time) of payouts.

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Case #16/#62/#89 - Listing of Baer token on Ethfinex

The Kleros Tokens registry was used at the time to curate tokens to be listed on the Ethfinex exchange in a decentralized manner. The Baer token was rejected because the community was able to prove that the project was a scam:
  • Their CTO was fake (a 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 later classified as a Ponzi scheme by the Chinese government a few months later.

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Case #554 - Registration of Kevin Owocki to Proof of Humanity

Proof of Humanity is a Sybil-resistant list of humans that uses social vouching and Kleros arbitration to ensure no fake, duplicate, or incorrect profiles make it into the registry. Kevin Owocki, the founder of Gitcoin, submitted his profile to PoH but was challenged because the policy asked for a “front-facing picture” and he provided one where he was looking at an angle. Long debates ensued to clarify what a front-facing picture meant and what an acceptable angle would be. The profile was finally rejected, but Kevin Owocki was able to submit another one and make it into the registry.

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Case #82 - Listing of Grid+ token on Ethfinex

The Kleros Tokens registry was used at the time to curate tokens to be listed on the Ethfinex exchange in a decentralized manner. The Grid+ token was rejected because the community estimated that, even if the project was legitimate, the rules required that the contracts be audited by a third party (and Consensys Diligence was not considered a third party, as Grid+ was a Consensys-incubated startup).

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Case #92 - “Is this a Doge or a cat in the snow?”

On July 31st 2018, the Kleros protocol was launched on Ethereum mainnet with a pilot called “Doges on Trial”, a curated list application that relied on user submissions to build a list of Doge memes. The 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, an image was submitted and, as it was not challenged during the initial 24-hour challenge period, it was accepted into the list a day later. The submitter claimed that the image was 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, as it did not “clearly display” a cat as stated in the rules. Coopérative Kleros and the submitter agreed to settle the dispute using the Kleros Escrow Dapp, and the payment was rejected in the end. Read more in the Kleros blog post on this case.