Kleros primary sources — 2026-05-07

Classification takeaway

Kleros is most usefully classified as decentralized arbitration infrastructure: a jury-based dispute-resolution system that turns subjective conflicts into onchain-enforceable rulings through court selection, evidence review, randomly drawn jurors, token staking, and appeal escalation. It also matters as a backstop for optimistic-oracle flows because Kleros Oracle explicitly combines Kleros arbitration with Reality.eth.

Primary sources reviewed

1. Project site — https://kleros.io/

   • Describes Kleros as “The Justice Protocol” and a decentralized arbitration service for disputes of the new economy.
   • Useful as the canonical root URL and product overview.

2. Documentation introduction — https://docs.kleros.io/

   • Defines Kleros as a decentralized dispute resolution protocol for use on smart-contract platforms.
   • Frames Kleros as a decentralized third party that applies rule sets to questions ranging from simple to highly complex.

3. Court documentation — https://docs.kleros.io/products/court

   • Says Kleros Court is the core engine of the product suite.
   • Explains that dapps send disputes to the court, jurors are randomly drawn, evidence is submitted, and jurors vote on a verdict.
   • Documents the court-and-subcourt tree, which is important because dispute routing and specialization are part of where authority actually sits.

4. PNK token documentation — https://docs.kleros.io/pnk-token

   • Says PNK is used both for juror staking and for governance decisions.
   • Explains why Kleros uses a native token: Sybil resistance, higher cost of majority capture, and a possible fork-based recovery path in an extreme attack.
   • Notes that appeal rounds increase jury size, which is central to the mechanism’s anti-capture design.

5. Oracle documentation — https://docs.kleros.io/products/oracle

   • Describes Kleros Oracle as a combination of Kleros dispute resolution and Reality.eth’s cryptoeconomic verification mechanism.
   • Makes Kleros directly relevant to the corpus’s subjective-oracle and arbitration-control work, not only to standalone dispute resolution.

6. Official whitepaper — https://kleros.io/whitepaper.pdf

   • Official whitepaper PDF saved locally as kleros-whitepaper.pdf.
   • Important as the canonical design reference even though the current docs are the easiest source for product-level mechanism details.

Why it stays in the active corpus

• Canonical comparison case for protocols where disputes are resolved by a distributed jury process rather than by a fixed admin, multisig, or signer committee.
• High-value counterpart for reality.eth because it surfaces how optimistic question systems depend on whoever gets final arbitration power.
• Useful mechanism anchor for reasoning about court specialization, appeals, native-token capture resistance, and the governance consequences of turning subjective judgments into execution inputs.