Kleros x Giveth integration proposal

[0xSynapse]

Proposal Description:

Kleros is the leading decentralized dispute resolution protocol in Web3. The Kleros Court system sits at the heart of the Kleros ecosystem, and leverages a decentralized pool of jurors to resolve disputes using Schelling-point based coordination games, allowing disputes to be resolved in a credibly neutral and efficient manner. Besides

The goal of this proposal is to leverage Kleros Court to secure the conditional distribution of funds to grantees. Kleros Court can be implemented as part of a off-the-shelf escrow contract provided by Kleros, allowing for fully decentralized control of time-based releases, scheduled vesting or milestone-based releases.

The primary benefit of this integration lies in automating, (partially) decentralizing, and securing the crowdfunding process. Giveth will retain the responsibility of vetting and approving crowdfunding campaigns, while Kleros can act as an independent judiciary in times of dispute, offering transparency and efficiency during the grant disbursement process.

Proposal Rationale:

Currently, Giveth operates on a peer-to-peer donation framework where funds are directly sent to project owners’ addresses. While the vetting process is extensive, there is no guarantee that the funds will be used as intended. Moreover, the current emission process lacks gradual vesting, which can mitigate the risks associated with fund misuse.

By integrating Kleros Escrow and Court, we address two major concerns: accountability and the access to a fair and efficient dispute resolution process. We strongly believe that this integration will bolster the trust and transparency between all parties involved in the crowdfunding process.

How Will the Integration Work?

Giveth will retain its responsibility for vetting projects seeking crowdfunding. However, Kleros Escrow and Court will play vital roles in the fundraising process, funds distribution, and dispute resolution.

Here’s how this integration will enhance the crowdfunding experience, outlining some options that can be used right away with zero technical integration:

• Kleros Escrow: Acting as a neutral intermediary, Kleros Escrow will securely hold funds until predetermined conditions are met. These conditions can be time-based releases or milestone-based releases triggered by the ruling of Kleros Court. By implementing this mechanism, we ensure that funds are only released when specified criteria are fulfilled, instilling trust and accountability.
  • Requiring just a workflow change for Giveth:
    • The Giveth team can perform payouts to the recipient addresses via escrow.kleros.io, which creates conditional transactions that will only be paid out when the predefined conditions are met.
  • Requiring no workflow change for Giveth:
    • Grantees create contracts that acts as recipient addresses for the Giveth grant payouts using the Zodiac Reality Module.
    • Funds received on these accounts will only be withdrawable upon the meeting of the withdrawal conditions.
    • As operating these trustless contracts require some guidance, Kleros will need to work with the initial batch of grantees to document the setup process.
• Kleros Court: In the unfortunate event of a dispute during a crowdfunding campaign, the decentralized jury of Kleros can step in to provide a credibly neutral dispute resolution service to both the donors and crowdfunders.
  • Using a ‘Recognition of Jurisdiction’ workflow:
    • Giveth can simply elect to recognise the jurisdiction of the Kleros Court and pledge to enforce the rulings after a case is concluded.
      If there are disputes between Giveth and grantees, any party can simply go to resolve.kleros.io to create the disputes by themselves.
  • Using a fully integrated workflow:
    • If and when Giveth wants to make the entire grant approval and payout process trustless, Kleros Court can be directly integrated with Giveth’s contracts to create a fully trustless integration.

Kleros offers various methods of integration to suit every organization’s needs, from entirely no-code solutions to fully trustless interfaces between grant protocols and Kleros Court. The technical details of the integration can be discussed and explored in more detail in the comments below, or in a follow-up post/discussion.

We believe that this integration will elevate the crowdfunding experience on Giveth, bringing automation, trust, decentralization, and security to the forefront. Together, Giveth and Kleros can create a paradigm shift in decentralized crowdfunding, empowering both creators and contributors to drive positive change.

[chuygarcia.eth]

Hello Giveth community!

A collaboration between Giveth and Kleros would be a huge NO for me. There are a number of points about how Kleros works where I think the protocol could be much improved, but far from having the will to improve, it worries me how Kleros has tried to fix/silence these issues in the past. Let me summarize my concerns in three main points:

Lack of Game Theory

Kleros has a huge gap in its system: PNK holders are incentivized to participate as a “decentralized” court because getting collateral from “bad” actors is economically attractive to them, but the problem begins when these court members get incentives from the presence of disputes, rather than from reaching solutions. This brings a bureaucratic layer that is convenient and attractive to Kleros jurors, but not for the protocols that use it.

Corruption

Founders of the Kleros cooperative have been involved in attacks to their own protocol, as evidenced by antikorrupt and FatManTerra in the past. On top of this, one of the Kleros founders has an ongoing legal process in Portugal for fraud. Far from innovating, Kleros’ concept of decentralized justice repeats the same mistakes as traditional systems where conflicts of interest are the standard when it comes to true justice. Hard-working members of different Giveth campaigns don’t deserve to put their resources at risk for political non-sense that has been Kleros’ compass in the past and that at the end of the day serves its users’ interests, not Giveth’s.

Values

Giveth is one of the best communities in the whole ecosystem to contribute to, mainly due to its values and positive community. The ruthless intervention of trolls whenever Kleros’ interests are exposed (even coordinated by their Comms lead) would be a threat to Giveth’s culture.
The founders of Kleros have focused in 4chan and other toxic internet communities’ members as its base for crypto market presence, which has brought a very undesirable atmosphere and even scaled up to extortions and intimidating:

(actual Kleros team members)

Conclusions

I’ve seen first hand the corruption that Kleros represents, and there’s nothing I would wish less for Giveth than a toxic community taking over and establishing a political dynamic around legitimate charities. Giveth also has access to decentralised courts where we’re much more familiar with its audiences such as Celeste or Nation3. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or comments, have a great day Giveth team!

[HBesso31]

My answer for this proposal does not need further thinking. Accepting Kleptos is like drinking a pill with 1000s of cancerous nanobots that will destroy every cell of this community.

Other alternatives for decentralized disputes exist. Don’t even lose your precious time with the K mafia.

[mateodaza]

No need to put much effort to my reply, @chuygarcia.eth gave an excellent summary on the reasons why. I was there very close on a recent drama with PoH, a DAO where I was pretty active in the early days, so I can attest to the deposition and don’t believe we share core values to try and work together.

Strong no to this.

[clesaege]

The 3 people answering are part of Open Proof Of Humanity, the “Santi” side of the fork of the Proof Of Humanity project so are in obvious conflict of interest as the Kleros team (who made Proof Of Humanity) is leading the Proof Of Humanity Origin side.
For those unaware of the drama, the Proof Of Humanity community became extremely divided between a side supported by the founders (whom I’m part of) focusing on security and increasing the usecases and side supported by Santi (the UBI founder), focused on UBI and lowering lost deposits.
This led to a working environment akin to workplace harassment and we proposed to peacefully fork the project to get out of this situation. This was approved by people of both “sides” of the project.

Corruption

The accusations given by Chuy are provably false.

@chuygarcia.eth

Founders of the Kleros cooperative have been involved in attacks to their own protocol, as evidenced by antikorrupt and FatManTerra in the past.

The alleged attack was actually people part of Kleros responding to an attack by Avraham Eisenberg (also known for his exploits of FortressDAO, Aave (note that this attack unprofitable but still created a loss for the Aave community) and Mango Markets) where he was trying to exploit Kleros and Unslashed for 2000 ETH.
Unfortunately we won’t be able to have his version as he is currently in custody and has been denied bail due to his the Mango Markets exploit.

@chuygarcia.eth

On top of this, one of the Kleros founders has an ongoing legal process in Portugal for fraud .

This part is pure defamation, the cooperative had a litigation (would have been a Kleros escrow dispute if Kleros was there at this time) about some marketing company who didn’t perform the promised work. We proposed to still pay them 60% of the sum (30k$) to settle the matter but they decided to go to court instead, asking 250k$ for damages and crypto price readjustment.
During the court process they provided some marketing strategy documents that they pretended to have created but we were able to show that we did in fact create those by showing the edit history of the google docs.
The court ruled that we didn’t need to pay anything. So our proposals, was in fact, way nicer for them than the final judgement.
You can read the final judgement here (note that it is in Portuguese).

Values

@chuygarcia.eth

The ruthless intervention of trolls whenever Kleros’ interests are exposed (even coordinated by their Comms lead ) would be a threat to Giveth’s culture.

This is again pure defamation, Jean is not in control of the forkDAO community and the forkDAO community was initially neutral of even sympathetic to the Open Proof Of Humanity side, as things evolved and they noticed more and more of the aggressive drama-like behavior (which the previous posts are a good example) their stance changed. We have no interest in bothering Open Proof Of Humanity, we are not creating drama, we are not going to their channels and we are not trying to prevent them from getting integrations (but for that, they may need to start building instead of trying to entertain the pre-fork drama).

@chuygarcia.eth

The founders of Kleros have focused in 4chan and other toxic internet communities’ members as its base for crypto market presence, which has brought a very undesirable atmosphere and even scaled up to extortions and intimidating:

Kleros tries to cater to a broader range of people, as to avoid biased rulings, we need to have a diverse set of jurors. You will find people on both ends of the Serious-Degen spectrum (from lawyers to 4channers), same for the Left-Right spectrum (from people supporting affirmative action to people complaining that Kleros is going “woke” as in our examples Alice is always winning her disputes). This is a good thing an healthy to prevent the community becoming an echo-chamber.

Conclusion

With Proof Of Humanity, we definitely made some mistakes, putting it fully decentralized and democratic with 1 person 1 vote from the start led the same kind of problems as we see in national politics. We are learning from it and are looking at democratic but strongly constitutional systems (I was last week in Florence working with an interdisciplinary group on constitutions for DAOs).

The previous posts are also showing one interesting benefit (for integrating projects) that when some rulings are controversial (like 60%-40%), we see the 40% thinking that “the court is broken” (not matter the ruling, there will always have been one side thinking, I call it the “curse of dispute resolution”) and using an external systems allows integrating projects to externalize this problem (which now falls on us ).

I know some people don’t like us (as they had a different vision for a project we created), but that actually shows that we are building things that people do care about. We did all we could to try to avoid drama and allow people to build peacefully, I know it may be a wishful thinking, but I hope that people we disagree will focus their energy on building instead of hate and drama.

Building in public is hard, decentralized organizations is hard and dispute resolution is hard. There are definitely things that with today insight, we would have done differently. However, Kleros is still by far the most mature crypto dispute resolution project with thousands of cases and millions of $ of value arbitrated. It has been working correctly since 2018, without bugs, exploits or wrong rulings, and for dispute resolution system that should be the main focus.

PS: I had to remove the links in the quote due to the link limit per post.

[ludoviko]

@clesaege

without bugs, exploits or wrong rulings

Is it though?

I invite forum members to check the following by themselves about "bugs(D.Y.OR.):

• Token distribution of PNK,
• Staking of founder’s wallet in critical courts that could sway the decision making towards the desire of them, and not in a decentralized way.
• Automatic and blind delegations to a Kleros founder in the one-person-one-vote system of Proof of Humanity, that were followed by a single wallet funding these efforts (later arguing some humanitarian cause and shielding any criticisms from that).
• Blatant obstruction of free speach, to the point that as of today, Clement is the person that performed most bans in the communities of PoH, and banned myself for one thousand years from Proof of Humanity forum, after being the most voted proposal author in the history of the DAO.
  
  

I would really consider this integration very carefully before committing to such a toxic environment.

My dm`s are open for any clarifications required.

[ludoviko]

@0xSynapse

Schelling-point based coordination games, allowing disputes to be resolved in a credibly neutral and efficient manner

Votes of disputes in Kleros are on-chain, so each actor in the game is able to see other parties votes before voting themselves, so this invalidates the main selling point of Kleros, the Schelling-point which in its assumptions it requires that there is no communication between actors. This not only not-true, but also jurors publicly discuss cases in telegram groups before voting.

[chuygarcia.eth]

@clesaege

Jean is not in control of the forkDAO community and the forkDAO community was initially neutral

Yeah, right.

@clesaege

We did all we could to try to avoid drama and allow people to build peacefully

This is you in October 2022, screaming non-sense at a respected member of the Ethereum México community that had nothing to do with your claims. In the meantime, your co-founder and associates sat behind you and giggled at your character’s fit.

Suceso previo a la Presentación de POH de Santiago Siri en Evento DEVCON...

I truly think that, as @HBesso31 accurately described, Kleros is a cancer and this video shows what happens when other cells get close.

This does not align with the values and principles at Giveth, so this proposal is still a solid NO to me.

[daisugist]

Hi Ludiviko, I can respond to this as it’s a question that is relevant to this proposal by @0xSynapse and to Giveth.
Kleros Court can operate in two modes: either with public voting as you described, or with a commit-reveal scheme, where jurors commit their vote on-chain first during the commit period, and then reveal their votes later on in the following period. The latter was designed to combat precisely the situation you described.

In any case, the appeal system of Kleros allows any case that resolved incorrectly to be appealed and brought to the attention of a different and larger panel of jurors, further strengthening the court against collusion, blackmailing and bribes.

[ludoviko]

@daisugist

commit-reveal scheme

do you have one example where this was implemented?

[clesaege]

@chuygarcia.eth

Kleros is a cancer

I think this shows that you didn’t accept the decision of the community which was to fork peacefully. Some people are here to build some people are here to make drama.

For the context of the video, the speaker was getting himself introduced as having launched Proof Of Humanity (thing that he has repeatedly done and even managed to fool a journalist of the Time magazine who had issue a correction). I hope that if someone else went to make a talk at a conference pretending to be the founder of Giveth, someone would speak out too (see the context of this, which was pretty bad with insults from people of the Open side, even including physical threats).

If you want to make a “Kleros is bad” thread, I think that it would avoid polluting the main thread. My TL;DR is:

• There has been some disagreement withing the Proof Of Humanity community.
• The community did agree to fork peacefully, this has been respected by most people, but a small group is continuing his crusade.
• Some accusations need a bit of analysis but some are disproven with a simple documents (cf the judgement of the lawsuit which trivial proof that the accusation of “being investigated for fraud” is false).
• We are not trying to impede the success of your project and I think it may even be a complementary approach (the Open side is now a national passport verification project, but still WIP). We would appreciate to be treated the same way as we treat you: at best with respect, at worse with indifference.

[daisugist]

We at Kleros are very glad that this proposal for integration with Giveth is being considered by the Giveth community.

To respect the Giveth community, I’d like to encourage all participants to keep the discussions on point and relevant to the proposal at hand. We at Kleros are happy to answer all questions that are directed at Kleros’s suitability for specific needs of the Giveth community.

[daisugist]

Certainly. All the cases that are resolved through the xDai/Gnosis General Court (see here) abide by this scheme.

Further, it should be noted that the commit-reveal scheme is the preferred setup from a game theory and mechanism design point-of-view. The ‘public vote’ mechanism was primarily (though not only) conceived as a UX improvement, as asking jurors to vote twice (read: 2x gas fees on ETH) is not ideal, and requiring them to come back a second time to reveal their votes could result in a high drop-off rate for vote completion (which weakens the security of the court).

If this is a concern, we could definitely have disputes coming from Giveth be resolved in a court that follows the commit-reveal scheme.

[ludoviko]

@daisugist

I’d like to encourage all participants to keep the discussions on point

Read this as “ignore any real threats to the system, with real evidences and everything, and let us manipulate the discourse in our favour”

Do not fall for this. Stay with the facts. Follow the money.

EDIT (after the comment below this one):
Be aware that trolls will try to hijack the discourse derailing it to somewhere else, using the lowest tactics ever, like the ad hominem below. We named this strategy “carroussel” in our forums, and it is a handbook move by Kleros trolls. The goal is to obfuscate or get people tired of a “drama” that they manufactured. Don’t fall for this trap!

[schizoidrentoid]

There’s about three trolls on this thread hijacking the purpose of a proposal discussion because their attempts to become petty protocol politicians backfired.

[mitch]

Hello all, I am Mitch, the DAO Ops lead for Giveth. I’ve been watching this conversation and I wanted take some time to chime in.

First of all, I would say that neither @chuygarcia.eth @mateodaza nor @HBesso31 are “trolls”.

Mateo has been working as a full-time developer for Giveth for the last 3 years.

Chuy is a long-time supporter of Giveth and has been a valuable contributor to our community for quite some time, many of us in the Giveth community have also worked with Chuy on other projects in the ecosystem.

Humberto is a super user of Giveth and his project, Urbanika, has been up on Giveth since launch.

THAT BEING SAID,

I’m not going to weigh in on any of these divisive issues posted above but I will transmit what we spoke about on the Gov call last Monday.

The original Giveth dApp, Giveth Trace, used to have built-in features similar to an escrow where users could approve or reject allocations of their funding from campaigns into specific milestones. While this was very novel at the time we did not experience great success with this system and in 2021, we deprecated the dApp.

We also are at a point in our development where we are not open to adding more complexity or features to Giveth, we believe Giveth already has a strong set of products and our goals right now are to scale our reach with what our dApp can already do.

That’s the gist of what we spoke of, I’ll leave it open for anyone else who was at the call, maybe I missed something, but the overall consensus was that an integration with Kleros doesn’t make sense for Giveth from a technical standpoint.

[ripperoni]

Hi there. It’s come to my attention some weirdo stalker is going into obscure Kleros bagholder chats to do… well I’m not sure what?

I’ve never heard of giveth before this. I do not appreciate being dragged into this utter nonsense - I do not work for the cooperative, in the screenshot I am COMPLAINING about Federico and Clement. I have the right to expect privacy as this was not some public group chat, it’s difficult to even articulate how absurd it is I’m being dragged into this.

Let me set the record straight:
1.anyone can buy PNK on uniswap
2.I have never been involved with or cared about Proof of humanity so leave me out of your obsessive drama and get a fucking hobby.

You can leave the text of my chat in the pic I stand by it, but censor out my name. Whoever was the one in that group chat for the sole purpose of screencapping stuff… get a life

As for the topic at hand everything in my post is irrelevant to the discussion, I just want my name censored out or the pictures deleted. I also want whoever the weirdo is to seriously seek help. I don’t even know who you are

[WhyldWanderer]

In the spirit of remaining on track and not letting personal opinions and emotions derail the discussion, I would like to re-iterate what Mitch has already said. The Giveth community has considered the given proposal and decided that we are not looking to add more complexity to the DApp right now. Actually, our focus is to do the opposite - to solidify the set of products that we already have.

We discussed this proposal in our Governance call on Monday and you can find the recording here starting at 43:45.
https://www.youtube.com/live/sBgGXVhzNsE?feature=share&t=2625

Since the community has already reached a decision to not move forward with this integration, I will be closing this forum topic.

---

I would also like to take this opportunity to remind everyone here of Giveth’s code of conduct when participating in public discussions like forum topics. If you need to refresh yourself, you can find it published here in our documentation:
Code of Conduct | Giveth Docs

In the future, please refrain from trolling, insulting/derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks to avoid facing temporary or permanent repercussions.