As the internet has made it incredibly easy for economic activity to happen across borders, the economies of countries across the globe are becoming increasingly twined. While global commercial activity seems smooth on the consumer side, the back-end of business operations involves myriad disputes which often involve lengthy legal duress.

The technology boom of the digital age has disrupted virtually every industry, but the legal system has remained largely static. Most industries are seeing new participants, that are able to generate a service at an economical scale, dominate the market share. The legal system, on the other hand, remains expensive and slow, especially when it comes to the arbitration of cross-border disputes.

Efficiency in the handling of legal matters can enable increased business activity with lower operational frictions. Decreased costs can enable more entrepreneurs to enter global commerce as the fear of legal fees would be mitigated. A new blockchain development aims to provide legal services at scale by utilizing the key principle of blockchain technology: decentralization.

A New Legal System

Jur is a platform that decentralizes the process of arbitration. Rather than having law firms represent clients and arbitrating the process on their behalf, Jur provides a decentralized network of oracles.

One of the fundamental benefits of blockchain technology is to provide immutable records; then, blockchain 2.0 ushered an era of smart contracts. Jur combines these 2 factors to create immutable contracts that can be analyzed by oracles to arbitrate any dispute.

Participants of a legal agreement can create a Smart Legal Agreement (smart contract) and deposit funds into the contract. Should the business activity that had been agreed upon move along as intended, the contract releases the funds to the rightful recipient. However, if there is a dispute among the participants of the agreement, a decentralized network of Oracles can be called upon to arbitrate the process.

The arbitration process shall work as such:

The disputing parties shall make a claim.
Oracles, who meet the minimum amount of staked tokens, will weigh in on the evidence provided by the disputing parties.
The party that receives the majority of the Oracles vote will receive the funds held in the Smart Legal Agreement; the Oracles voting for the losing side will lose their stake.

Expensive to be Unjust

Jur’s dispute resolution system delves off the classic PoS mechanism.

As Smart Legal Contracts will contain immutable terms of the contract, Oracles will simply need to match the evidence provided by disputing parties with the terms stated in the contract. The Oracles have staked tokens to gain the right of weighing in. The loss of staked tokens incentivizes Oracles to make the right decision.

The platform will be available for free for 3 resolution requests per month. After that, enterprises that utilize the service must pay a fee. A portion of these fees will fuel rewards for Oracles. Thus, Oracles are incentivized to remain just to gain their share of the reward and to avoid loss of their staked tokens. This is a sharply different from the current legal system where the jury has nothing at stake and faces no penalty for giving an improper decision.

Immediately Applicable

Given the rise of the gig economy and online fund raising, Jur can remove the trust factor between agreements. Provides the APIs to external enterprises so that they may seamlessly utilize the dispute resolution protocol.

Online freelance contracts can be issued as Smart Legal Agreements; fundraising on platforms like Kickstarter can ink terms on Smart Legal Agreements; ICOs can be launched with the integration of Smart Legal Agreements. Smart contracts are proven means of providing an escrow service.

However, most commercial activity is complex beyond basic contractual terms and off-chain incidents can render the decision-making power of a smart contract moot. Thus, an Oracle network that functions as a decentralized jury system fills in the gap to provide arbitration when necessary.

Utilizing the immutable state of the blockchain and the effectiveness of smart contracts to improve the state of the arbitration system is an incredible utility of blockchain technology and demonstrates the tangible benefits decentralization can provide to commercial activity.