Oath Protocol, Decentralized Conflict-Management Layer: Q&A Series #2

You have questions? We have answers! Find the answers to our most frequently asked questions in this post.

Greetings Oath Protocol family! We are back with the second installment of our Q&A. If you have a question that is not listed or answered here, or in the previous Q&A post, please help us grow the FAQ section by submitting your questions here.

1. What problems is your project trying to solve?

We believe that blockchain security should have two layers: cybersecurity and governance. Although the focus tends to be on cybersecurity (anti-hacking, code review, etc.), regular users encounter user conflicts/disputes more often than security hacks in their day-to-day usage, making governance just as important as cybersecurity. This is even more true in a decentralized ecosystem that does not (or should not) have centralized arbitration services.
Presently, a decentralized, transparent, and fair dispute resolution system with no conflict of interest is an important missing piece on the blockchain, and this is exactly what we’re building here at Oath.

2. What is your solution?

We combine one of the most reliable legal systems from the real world — the Anglo-American common law jury system — with blockchain technologies, cryptography, computing algorithms, game theory reputation system, and other concepts to provide a layer 2 cross-chain infrastructure for a decentralized, standard, and extensible public chain-agnostic protocol that protects dApp users’ rights and assets.

3. What is your token’s utility?

OATH is an ERC-20 (Ethereum-based) token intended to provide three utilities: (1) it allows participants to access the dispute resolution and governance platform, (2) it rewards jurors for making good decisions (voting for the winning party), and (3) holding OATH will give jurors the ability to increase their “credit level” and, as a result, be eligible for higher awards.

4. How is Oath different from other governance protocols?

Decentralized community decisionmaking: Oath Protocol relies on regular blockchain users to form its juror community and decide cases, initially with juries ranging from 11–101 jurors, without requiring one to hold or stake OATH tokens to qualify for juries.
Semi-decentralized voting process: only two transactions take place on-chain (and require gas fees to record), providing immediate scalability and keeping costs low.
Oath Protocol is a layer 2 protocol compatible with any public chains or dApps via APIs.

5. How is blockchain technology critical to your project?

First, blockchain technology naturally provides cryptography and transparency — two key values for any fair and just system. The token system also allows us to reward our users who serve as jurors and incentivize them to maintain and grow the ecosystem.
Second, Oath Protocol addresses the lack of standard governance and dispute resolution solution on the blockchain. This problem is unique to decentralized p2p ecosystems that are built to eliminate third-party intermediaries traditionally tasked with resolving disputes between contracting parties. In the absence of such an intermediary, there is an acute need for a way to facilitate decentralized community governance and dispute resolution.

6. What are some of your obstacles and how do you plan to overcome them?

The main obstacle is beating our competitors to mass market adoption.
As the standard layer 2 protocol for blockchain dispute resolution and governance, we will succeed if we can form a critical mass of partnerships with public chains, dApps, and traditional platforms that will adopt our protocol over our competitors’.
The path to mass adoption is through aggressive expansion of our partnership network. By having presence in both Asia and the US, we are able to target two of the world’s largest markets, and we are approaching potential partners via personal connections, investor connections (especially in foreign jurisdictions like Russia and India), attendance of events and conferences, and active participation in online crypto communities.

7. How do you select juries? How do you prevent vote-buying?

Our settings and algorithms ensure that the jurors are selected randomly from a diverse jury pool (within certain parameters that can be set by the parties) and do not serve on more than one jury together to reduce bias and prevent collusion. In addition, the jurors’ identities are concealed from the parties and other jurors to preserve objectivity and eliminate external influence like bribery.
We will rely on Oath’s credit level system and our partner DREP’s decentralized reputation system to differentiate among jurors with different voting and reputation scores, which will allow us to assemble juries that best fit particular cases, i.e., juries with high credit/reputation scores for higher-value cases.

8. How will you maintain your own transparency?

Oath is a open-source, transparent protocol. Anyone could follow our code progress and development on GitHub, and our code building is modeled on black box using Intel’s trusted computing hardware.

9. How does your cross-chain compatibility work?

Our official token, OATH, will be an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum network. For our public chain network partners, like Quarkchain or NEM, we will release alternative versions of the token (e.g., OATH-Q or OATH-N, respectively) to facilitate cross-chain exchange. To maintain the 10 billion total OATH supply, we will lock the amounts of ERC-20 OATH equal to the amounts of issued alternative versions, released once the alternative versions are swapped for the ERC-20 tokens by users.
Please check out our token post for more detailed information.

10. What are your main use cases?

For the blockchain ecosystem, Oath Protocol is a highly versatile protocol that can be used in a wide variety of cases, including, but not limited to, e-commerce, p2p marketplaces, short-term home rentals, travel bookings, content publishing platforms, blockchain insurance, prediction markets, and news verification.
For the traditional industry, Oath Protocol can be used to replace traditional (and often biased and expensive) intermediaries tasked with resolving user disputes or verifying information to add more fairness and cost-effectiveness to the system. We are presently negotiating partnerships with second-hand e-commerce platforms to replace their dispute-resolution mechanisms.
You can check out our post about Oath Protocol’s use cases for more detailed information.

11. Who is on your team?

We have a solid, international founding team that fuels Oath Protocol’s progress.
Three out of four of our co-founders have degrees in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Peking University, and Tsinghua University, and include a former senior engineer at Google, former tech lead at Trip.com, and founder of cryptoexchange ex-btc.com. They have more than 10 years of combined experience building and leading tech teams, including to acquisition. Our forth co-founder is a litigation attorney with a law degree from Georgetown University, and experience at one of the best law firms in the US and Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office.
Other essential team members are in charge of graphic design, quantitative modeling, content management, and business development, and are graduates of Oxford University, Columbia University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Konstanz University in Germany.

Check out our website for any additional information and to read our Whitepaper.
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