Jur co-founder, Alessandro Palombo, explained how Jur will help people create a better jurisdiction at the recent Polkadot Decoded event on the Berlin stage in a presentation entitled “A Native Jurisdiction for a Trusted Web3.”
Adoption And The Problem Of Trust
Ale began by talking about the problem of trust and considering the history of internet adoption. In the early days of the internet, businesses did not take responsibility when things went wrong. Until they realised consumers demand reliability and they would lose money if they did not provide it. Now, eBay, Alibaba, and others are taking responsibility and resolving millions of disputes every year. Legal rights and efficient enforcement turned out to be a crucial part of a trustable foundation that was required for internet adoption.
Today, Web 3 technology faces a similar challenge. Ironically, “trustless” decentralised systems suffer from a lack of trust.
Crossing The Chasm To Mainstream Adoption
How confident are we, Ale asked, when we put $20,000 in a smart contract? What happens if something goes wrong? We need clear rules for agreements. Typically, legal agreements have had three properties, identities, clauses (details of the agreement), and a dispute resolution clause – an agreement specifying what to do when there is a disagreement.
Web 3 Needs To Create Trust
Smart contacts seem like a good idea – immutable business logic. But what happens when they deliver unexpected results that people think are unfair? DAOs and other smart contract applications to a major or minor extent potentially rely on offline jurisdictions when things go wrong, bringing us back to those three required principles, identities, clear agreements, and dispute resolution. But it is not working so smoothly, Ale observed.
“Literally every week something happens that shows the limits of the intersection and the interactions between well web3 and the legal systems as a whole.”
Introducing The Decentralised Autonomous Jurisdiction
To solve the problem of trust for Web 3, Jur proposes the concept of a Decentralised Autonomous Jurisdiction. A new form of governance that creates and enforces rules in a way that is predictably interconnected with offline jurisdictions while operating according to free market principles.
“Our mission, is to create the most efficient jurisdiction for the digital economy and for web3 in particular.”
The system is autonomous in the sense that, like the merchant law system of medieval Europe, it transcends governments and is not controlled by a central authority. You can choose your source for arbitration and your set of rules in a free market provided with decentralized ledger technology. But these decisions are enforceable under the existing legal framework of the UNICTRAL Model Law, so whether you need to enforce within the protocol or in the “meat-space” offchain world, you get reliable results either way.
The system is decentralised in the sense that it is based on censorship resistant technology and it is owned and created by citizens, token holding members of a Network State.
Three Protocols for A Network State
Jur will provide three essential components for a Network State that can provide efficient regulation for the Web 3 economy – limited liability identity, open source standard legal contracts, and decentralized arbitration.
Currently, companies have defined limits to their liability which may be less than their total assets, but individuals don’t have this luxury; everything an individual owns is at risk. By allowing citizens to attach escrows to their passports, Jur creates anonymized accountability with defined limits.
Meanwhile, many hours are carefully counted and billed for creating new versions of the same contract for the same use case. Jur working groups will create flexible contract templates for common use cases (like NDAs or freelance service agreements) that anyone can customize.
Finally, Jur will address the problem of inefficient courts with unclear jurisidction by providing easy global access to legally binding and enforceable UNICTRAL compliant arbitration with an updated version of its existing Jur Arbitration Platform.
Roadmap Highlights
The core of the arbitration platform has already been developed in Q1 of 2022. The testnet is under development and will be released in Q3 2022 and the token swap will happen in Q4 2022.
Ale’s Closing Thought & Invitation
“Next time that you might have your NFT copyright infringed or your agreement unfulfilled you can decide to seek remedy in Switzerland or Singapore and maybe wait months or years or you can rely on Jur and resolve the dispute in one click.
For these early days we have created an NFT passport. It's completely free. You can go online and get it right now. Essentially it's a commemorative NFT and maybe in two years from now you will be able to say well I was an “OG” of Jur.”
Get Your Free NFT Passport here