Oath is a security layer that provides a dispute resolution and governance solution for the blockchain ecosystem.
“Code is Law,” but we believe that Common Consensus is the real law. While code may resolve certain issues according to its pre-defined parameters, Common Consensus can address a much broader and flexible range of potential disputes that are not or cannot be pre-defined. Our vision is to create a robust, fair, and decentralized standard dispute resolution protocol that can be used by both public chains and dApps to facilitate community decision making.

An oath is a solemn promise or attestation of truth. It includes Juror’s Oath, which is an oath taken by jurors before serving on a jury and deciding a case, promising to try the case to the best of their ability and according to the evidence.
Not only does it sound cool, but it also also directly relates to what we are doing.

Oath is a standard blockchain-agnostic protocol. In a nutshell, through APIs, we are compatible with any public chain or dApp.

Proof of Common Sense is our term to describe the consensus mechanism used by Oath jurors to decide a case. The jurors use their common sense to judge the dispute based on provided evidence as well as their sense of right and wrong. Just like regular jurors in the Anglo-American common law system, Oath jurors do not need specific expertise or skills to be selected to serve on a jury, and our built-in mechanisms will score each juror’s reputation and credibility (“credit level”) automatically over time, so the jurors’ effectiveness can be tracked over time.
PoCS is the ultimate result of the jury vote that leads to the case verdict.

We have analyzed and evaluated several alternatives to facilitate efficient evidence authentication. Our approach is based on the mathematical model of strategic interaction between two parties (in this case, parties to a dispute) called game theory. The parties’ are incentivized to provide authentic and complete evidence to win the jurors’ trust. If one party uploads a fake, modified, or incomplete document, the other party or a juror can instantly respond and provide missing or misrepresented information.

Oath protocol employs a “juror credit level” mechanism. The mechanism rewards desirable behavior, such as siding with the prevailing party and making timely decisions, and penalizes judges who continuously misjudge or delay the process by failing to render timely decisions. Jurors with higher credit levels earn higher awards for deciding cases and have the opportunity to decide cases on appeal. Conversely, lower credit levels decrease one’s awards and the range of available cases. Continuous misbehavior and inactivity will lead to increased penalties and potentially even an expulsion from the Oath jury community. Finally, to prevent joint judging or collision of interests, our algorithms randomly choose the jurors who have not served on any recent cases together.

OATH chain includes one case ledger and one IPFS for file storage.
The case ledger is used to keep relevant data of all cases such as contract contents, verdicts, voting reasons, selected jurors, etc. The IPFS system stores case-related evidence files. Together, they create an immutable and searchable record of all cases decided via Oath protocol. This benefits the ecosystem because it allows jurors or other interested parties to review past cases and verdicts any given point, whether to guide their decision making or monitor for repeat offenders.

Once our platform is ready for use, you will be able to apply on Oath’s Juror Application Portal by submitting an application with information about your gender, age, nationality, language, educational background, etc.
Initially, we will have a Jury Community Management team to review the applications and assign initial juror credit levels. Once our community has sufficiently grown, applications will be reviewed by active jurors with high credit scores who will be compensated for their effort. Jurors will also be rewarded from the case commission fee pool for inviting new juror applicants to the community.

Oath will never share your personal identifying information with anyone.
When a juror signs up and provides general information (e.g., age group, nationality, level of education), the data is encrypted and saved on the Oath Blockchain. Our random algorithm then uses the provided information to categorize and selects jurors from diverse categories to serve together to reduce biases and guarantee a fair and diverse jury.
The information provided during the sign-up process is only required to guarantee a fair and decentralized judging procedure.

Oath is a protocol (library/extension layer), and it can be easily integrated through APIs on any public chain or dApp. In addition to API integration, the Oath platform also offers smart contract templates that automatically embed our protocol. For any collaboration inquiries, please reach out to Michael Wurzinger at [email protected]

Our whitepaper is available in English and Mandarin Chinese. We also plan to translate it into other languages, and we welcome your suggestions, as well as help, with those translations. The new editions of the white paper will be published on our website once they are ready.

We will shortly announce a community-building bounty program, to encourage and reward our community members for spreading the word about Oath, helping us grow our juror community, and providing feedback on our progress. Once we are ready to release an early version of our technology, we will announce a bug bounty program, and we look forward to inviting our community alongside our engineering and development team to make our technology as strong as possible.

We are always happy to help as well as hear suggestions about any features or issues you think we should address. Just reach out to us at [email protected] or submit your questions here (here is a link to: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1hfHYJLsNdVOSBuNIRhd4Ccgmj0K3tLXeCMNZ2mRFUDc/edit).