DemoThemis The most ambitious arbitration service ever made

Booking an Airbnb from a stranger and paying before arrival looks reckless on paper. It feels ordinary because Airbnb can refund you, a card issuer can reverse the charge, and reviews punish repeat cheating. The safety comes from the arbiter behind the stranger.

Marketplaces such as eBay, gig apps such as Uber, ad auctions such as Google Ads, app stores such as Apple's App Store, and prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi all outsource dispute resolution to a platform, bank, or token vote. The result can be house owned (the outcome resolution is more likely to resolve in whatever direction favors the interest of the application managing the resolution rather than what is most true or fair), slow, expensive, or buyable by the largest holders like UMA and Kleros. DemoThemis turns that hidden utility into shared arbitration, with optional protocol escrow if applications want us to handle escrow.

A shared court from the first customer

From the first customer, DemoThemis gives any platform customer dispute resolution and optional escrow, even before it has the scale, in-house dispute operation, case history, or capital to build a system people can trust. Businesses get a neutral court they do not have to run, customers get rulings made by jurors rather than the business, and protocol escrow can hold and release funds automatically when money is involved.

One court, many apps

Build the arbiter once, share it everywhere

Any person or app can submit a well-defined case, fund its jurors, and receive an independent ruling from randomly drawn, verified humans. If assets are involved, optional escrow can execute that ruling automatically.

The requesting person or application supplies the case, decision criteria, evidence rules, and juror fee. DemoThemis returns the ruling; when assets are involved, optional escrow can release or refund them by rule. Each customer replaces a private dispute-resolution system with one shared court.

The court fee

Charge a one-time court fee for each case

When a resolution request is accepted, the protocol calculates one court fee using the fee rules in force for that case: processing cost + required panel compensation + contribution to future juror rewards + capped operations charge. The requesting person or application pays it before the draw.

Every court, with or without escrow, collects the full initial work quote before the first draw. Each later appeal needs its own full payment. The application chooses the route. It cannot choose a juror or change accepted terms.

Qualified supply and demand determine juror compensation under the published pricing rules. Those rules can change only between scheduled policy updates, and no application-provided budget, escrow value, or payout rule can reduce the quote for an accepted case. The rate responds to court-wide demand, eligible supply, pending workload, response time, and panel size. Time and complexity bands are recalibrated between policy updates from measured juror service, using medians so no single case can move them.

The requesting application chooses the complete jury route before submission. DemoThemis enforces the agreed route, fees, deadlines and eligibility rules.

The Fortify The Court chapter follows those rules from the first payment to finality and later juror audits.

The wrong foundation

When votes are tokens, verdicts have a price

DemoThemis assigns votes to randomly selected, verified jurors rather than in proportion to tokens held. Each selected juror has one vote.

In token courts like UMA and Kleros, voting weight follows the wallet, so a majority has a market price. Disputed Polymarket resolutions show the problem in practice; the evidence is in the OmenMarketMaker chapter.

That is not merely a bad implementation. If stake is voting power, the protocol works as written when the largest holder wins. An attacker reads the rule as a price list: acquire enough tokens and buy the verdict.

DemoThemis gives each selected juror one vote, regardless of wealth. The 3-of-5 identity check stops one person registering several jurors.

The draw

Pay before the jury is known

If an application could see the selected jurors before committing, it could abandon an unfavourable panel and keep trying until a corrupted group was selected. DemoThemis prevents this by requiring the application to lock any escrow and pay the court fee before the jury is drawn. Once the jury is selected, the case cannot be cancelled or rerolled because of who was chosen. Starting again requires paying for a separate case, while the original case continues.

The jury is drawn using a public random number released at predetermined times, so nobody can choose when it is created or influence its result. If the random used to make the draw was dependent on the time of request then the request could influence the random number output and therefore influence the draw.

Application configuration

Applications set the terms. DemoThemis draws the jurors.

The application chooses the question, complete jury route, spending authorization, result handling and appeal-funding windows before acceptance. The route can repeat or decrease in size. The protocol selects the jurors and enforces the accepted terms. See the configuration guide.

DemoThemis uses Beta to estimate each juror’s quality from their private case history. Appeals and audits of overturned decisions supply evidence for that history. The score can affect future pay offers and the chance of receiving work, not the strength of a selected juror’s vote. A permanent ban requires the top of the approved 95% uncertainty range to be below 70%, enough real case evidence and completed audits.

Why shared history compounds

Private history improves quality without exposing jurors

Each completed case creates two records. A signed receipt proves the final ruling and any connected settlement to the customer. A private juror record stores service and the results used in Beta. The juror can read their own record. Auditors receive the evidence needed for their task. Other people see only a quality band or proof that the juror qualifies, not individual votes or earnings.

The grader's paradox

Why majority agreement cannot measure judgment quality

Grade jurors on matching the majority and the safe strategy becomes guessing the room instead of reading the case. The diagram shows how a wrong consensus can produce perfect-looking scores.

This is not a rare edge case. Once agreement determines careers, independent judgment adds risk but no reward. DemoThemis therefore does not use agreement with the first majority to grade jurors. Only qualifying final appeal confirmations and final Careless audits change Beta. Outside research helps auditors assess the original work. It cannot write quality credit directly. The loop chapter explains how completed cases build that private record.

Audits and quality

An overturned answer is not proof of careless work

Auditors assess a juror's own work after the case is final. Only a final Careless assessment can add that audit's negative quality result. Reasonable and Insufficient information add neither credit nor a penalty. Follow the audit, its funding and the one paid repeat audit in Fortify the Court.

Repeat-audit payment and refundable deposit.

One court

Every case contributes to one private quality record

Every case uses the same random draw, private ballots, appeal ladder, and juror-quality system. The question and decision criteria are fixed before the draw, and every final case creates a private record that later quality evidence can update.

A published market price or delivery receipt can help an auditor check the juror’s explanation. It does not directly change Beta. The same scoring rules apply to every kind of case.

Every completed assignment enters private service history. Only the two final results defined below enter the scoring history. Agreement with an unchallenged majority earns no quality credit.

The reputation dial

Beta estimates quality from a juror’s case history

Beta is the chosen model, not Wilson or a combination of the two. It calculates a range of possible quality levels from the case results that the court allows into a juror’s record. The average gives one estimate. The 95% range shows how uncertain that estimate is under the model. It does not mean there is a 95% chance that the latest verdict was right.

What changes Maya’s calculation?

Beta average =
  (1 + appeal-confirmed cases)
  ÷ (2 + appeal-confirmed cases + careless-work cases)

Base pay is the assignment price before this multiplier. Selection weight is relative to a new qualified juror’s 1. Weight 2 is not two votes or a guaranteed chance of selection. With no scored cases, both rates are 1. With confirmations but no Careless case, neither falls below 1. The first scored result affects future offers. Accepted pay and equal votes never change.

The three-times draw cap matters because court security comes from a wide active pool, not a small class of stars. Accuracy still compounds into more work and private income, but no juror dominates selection.

Court fees fund future juror rewards

The shared juror reward pool pays weekly rewards to jurors who meet the quality and recent-work requirements below. Part of each court fee continues to fund the pool, however large its balance becomes. The published pricing formula sets the contribution.

Each week, the software allocates up to 40% of new pool income left after committed costs and recovery of earlier losses. This is not 40% of the accumulated balance. At least 60% of that net new income stays in the pool before later costs. A loss-making week creates no new rewards. Money already owed or committed cannot be distributed. Qualifying jurors share the rewards by the quality weights above, with individual payments kept private.

Start with new income the pool may keep this week.
Subtract pool-funded costs once, when committed.
Cover losses still unrecovered from earlier weeks.
If nothing remains, allocate no new rewards.
Otherwise, calculate 40% of the remainder.
Pay no more than money not already owed or committed.
If nobody qualifies, allocate nothing.

The same pool covers increases and receives savings when a replacement accepts work.

An appeal can also require a refundable security bond, separate from its fee. At finality, the bond returns if the final ruling differs from the ruling that appeal challenged. Otherwise it enters the shared pool. Public proofs verify correct accounting without revealing individual payments.

Direct accountability

What a juror’s quality record changes

Beta changes future pay, selection and eligibility. It never changes the strength of a selected juror’s vote. Audit deductions are separate and are explained with the audit in Fortify the Court.

Careless-work deductions and the earnings-based cap.

Lenient on purpose

A permanent ban requires confident evidence of poor performance

The Beta range is only one requirement for a permanent ban. Its top end must be strictly below 70%. A top end equal to 70% does not pass. The juror must have at least 10 scored cases, with all applicable audit challenges completed. This minimum limits bans, not when an audit may start. A short history or one overturned verdict is not, by itself, proof of careless work.

Future pay offers and the chance of selection can change before a permanent ban is justified. A completed audit can also support a separate careless-work charge. Neither consequence requires making one selected juror’s vote weaker than another’s.

A juror who voted against the original majority receives quality credit when a final appeal confirms that vote. A juror on the overturned side loses quality only if a completed audit establishes careless work that applies to them. Auditors judge the evidence available at the time. They cannot treat a missing explanation or reasonable disagreement as carelessness. The update does not publicly identify the juror.