Скачать или смотреть Crypto and DeFi Private Governance | University of Oxford × Kleros

Why Private Governance (introduced by @federicoast)

Crypto is replaying a familiar pattern from commerce: before states standardized markets, communities did, via membership rules, reputation, and fast, fit-for-purpose organizations (think coffee houses, merchant courts, early exchanges).

In web3, that “private order” maps to ex-ante curation (raise information quality before things go live) and ex-post adjudication (resolve disputes credibly when they do). Kleros sits at this junction: Curate/Scout standards to prevent bad listings and ambiguous market prompts; Court decisions when conflicts arise.

🎓 Ekin’s Research (Oxford Law, DPhil)

Focus: DeFi as Private Order, or how real governance happens beyond the false binary of “code-is-law” vs. “only the state.” Ekin studies the human layer (forums, incident response, curator norms, juror behavior) that keeps protocols functional when automation meets ambiguity.

Key questions:

▸ What norms and incentives actually deter fraud, misinformation, or low-quality submissions?
▸ How do communities escalate from soft norms to formal resolution (or even handoffs to public institutions)?
▸ Which designs minimize disputes up front (ex-ante) and which yield robust, accepted verdicts (ex-post)?
▸ Method: qualitative interviews + digital ethnography (Discords, forums, governance archives). Oxford ethics apply: informed consent, optional anonymity, right to withdraw.
▸ Outputs & timeline: dissertation → book-length publication, with periodic public notes.
▸ Call to participate: operators, jurors, builders, moderators—share incidents, playbooks, and “what actually worked.”

📚 The Oxford Program | Law × CS with Kleros

Track A — University of Oxford, Oxford Law (Ekin): socio-legal backbone for “private order” in DeFi; documents the living institutions (curation pipelines, dispute kits, governance rituals) that make credible markets possible.

Track B — Oxford CS (Owen Green, with Prof. Paul Goldberg): mechanism design & computational social choice for juror systems—e.g., handling multi-option cases, clone-independence, strategy-proof aggregation, and adversarial incentives.