Guide
Dispute Settlement: Stake-Backed Voting and Reputation
How Noesea settles contested claims — stake-backed attestations and challenges, beacon-seeded juror selection, slashing, and reputation updates with recorded dissent.
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Stake-backed positions
Anyone can vouch for or challenge a claim by staking. Putting capital behind a position is what gives the signal weight: a challenge with stake is a costly, credible assertion that a claim or its evidence does not hold up.
Juror selection and voting
When a dispute opens, jurors are selected using externally supplied randomness when available, with an on-chain fallback, and vote in commit-reveal rounds so positions remain hidden until reveal. This reduces herding and bandwagon effects while making degraded randomness visible to the protocol.
Outcome, slashing and reputation
The verdict records direction, finality, vote counts, and dissent separately. Stakes may be slashed only under the committed settlement rules, and topic-scoped reputation records attributable protocol participation; neither stake nor reputation is knowledge or truth authority.
The dispute lifecycle, step by step
A dispute opens against a registered claim: the claim type and bond are validated and the opener's stake is locked. A jury is then requested — the eligible juror set is frozen as a snapshot and a future draw block is pinned, so nobody can pick the randomness after seeing the pool. Jurors are drawn from that snapshot, optionally mixing a drand randomness beacon with the chain source, and bonded. They commit hidden votes, then reveal them. The verdict is finalized and an appeal window opens. An appeal draws a new, larger panel only from jurors who have not served in an earlier round of the same dispute. When the last appeal window closes, party stakes settle.
Deadlines and vote commitments
Commit, reveal and appeal windows are measured in wall-clock seconds rather than block numbers, because block production on a rollup can pause. The current defaults are one day to commit, twelve hours to reveal and two days to appeal, and governance can move each window only within a bounded range of one hour to thirty days. A vote commitment is keccak256 over the vote, a secret salt, the claim ID and the juror's address, so a reveal is accepted only from the juror who committed it and only for that claim.
No stranded stake, no forced verdict
Every phase that holds stake has a permissionless exit: a stalled dispute can be aborted after its window, a round with no reveals expires, and anyone can trigger finalization or settlement once the deadlines pass. A tie or a below-quorum round produces a settlement record but is reported as inconclusive, not as a decisive verdict.
What reputation rewards
Reputation is topic-scoped, non-transferable, capped and decaying, and it only counts for accounts with a valid human-identity binding. Jurors who reveal on time receive the same process reputation whichever side they voted for, and voting with the minority or abstaining with reasons is not slashed. The design avoids paying jurors simply for agreeing with the majority.
Current status
Noesea is pre-launch. The dispute engine is implemented and tested, but no juror pool operates on a public network yet and no live verdict has been produced. The parameters described here are current contract defaults and can change before launch.
FAQ
Common questions about dispute settlement
Does the token vote decide what is true?
No. Noesea does not run a one-token-one-truth vote. Juror outcomes preserve direction, finality, vote counts, and dissent as separate fields. The result records how a claim was reviewed; it is not an official declaration of truth or a calibrated probability.
What is slashing for?
Slashing makes dishonest or careless positions costly. Staked capital on a losing position can be reduced, which aligns incentives toward accurate attestations and well-grounded challenges.
How is reputation earned?
Reputation is topic-scoped and accrues to participants whose attestations and votes track outcomes over time. It is non-transferable credibility state, not a tradable asset.
Can a dispute get stuck with stake locked?
No phase that holds stake can strand it. Each has a permissionless exit after its deadline — abort, expire, finalize or settle — so funds are released even if participants stop responding.
Is the dispute process live?
Not yet. Noesea is pre-launch: the dispute engine is implemented and tested, but no juror pool operates on a public network and no live verdict has been produced.
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