Announcing Kleros Token Sale

We are delighted to announce Kleros token sale will start on the 15th of May 2018.

We decided to use a new method for token distribution proposed by Vitalik Buterin called Interactive Coin Offering (IICO). IICOs are designed to be more egalitarian than conventional public sales, which aligns with the principles guiding the Kleros project.

Why a Token?

The goal of the public sale is to fairly distribute our token, the pinakion (PNK), to the community.

PNK works as economic incentive for jurors to rule the cases correctly and protects the system against attacks by malicious actors (to understand how, read our white paper).

Users are required to put tokens as a deposit in order to be selected as jurors. After the jury has come to a decision, jurors voting incoherently with the others will pay a part of their deposit as a penalty.

This system of incentives is based on the game theoretical concept of Schelling Point. Developed by 2005 Nobel Prize winner Thomas Schelling, it refers to how agents make decisions under certain decision structures and under certain constraints of information (it’s somewhat similar to the more well known Prisonner’s Dilemma).

The bottom line is that jurors who rule cases honestly will tend to earn tokens over time, and jurors who try to game the system will lose tokens.

A better token distribution means a more solid system and less probability for a successful 51% attack. This is one of the advantages of the IICO methodology.

Token Sale Mechanics

We believe that the mechanisms generally used for public distribution of tokens are broken. The reasons were explained by Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, in this post.

Vitalik, Jason Teutsch, CEO of Truebit, and Christopher Brown, CEO of Modular, have proposed a new model for token sales called Interactive Initial Coin Offering (IICO), which gives participants certainty about valuation and participation in the sale.

Kleros will be one of the first projects to conduct a token crowdsale with this method.

One of the guiding principles of the IICO model is that it eliminates favoritism and deep discounting. We have declined private sale offers, electing to proceed directly to a public sale in which everyone has an equal opportunity to acquire tokens at the same rate.

Instead of making one large sale in one round as most projects, the sale will be done through multiple rounds as we reach critical product milestones.

The Road Forward

Kleros is based on the fundamental principles of justice and democracy in ancient Greece, improved upon by the invention of the blockchain, and applied to the modern global age of the internet.

Our core values of justice and fairness will be reflected in the methodology we have chosen for the token sale. We aim at setting a new standard of quality.

In demonstrating a working MVP, a clear roadmap and a fair token sale, our hope is to bring back some sort of sanity to a somewhat crazy ICO market and instill confidence in those that believe in what we’re doing.

We’re extremely proud of the work we have done in the past year, with a great team of nine people from all around the world.

Kleros was entirely self funded from the outset and we have not created any FOMO incentives to drive engagement.

Ultimately, our goal is to bring justice and arbitration to millions of people who have otherwise been marginalized and priced out of doing so by the current systems.

Satoshi’s original vision was for the majority to be able to interact and take control over certain aspects of their lives which were hitherto inaccessible. As Bitcoin came with the promise of banking the unbanked, Kleros comes with the promise of bringing “justice to the unjusticed”.

Fast, transparent and inexpensive justice for all.

We will give more details about the token sale in the coming weeks. Stay tuned and join our Telegram community here !

Learn more

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