Skip to main content
This section describes how voting and economic incentives operate in practice within Justly.
For the theoretical rationale behind these mechanisms, see Security & Game Theory.
Justly uses an incentive-driven voting system designed to align honest human judgment with economic outcomes. The protocol does not attempt to determine truth algorithmically.
Instead, it relies on structured human voting combined with economic incentives to converge toward fair and reliable decisions.

​
Independent Juror Participation

Jurors participate independently in each dispute and are evaluated economically on outcome coherence. Staking aligns incentives by creating meaningful upside for coherent decisions and downside for incoherent behavior.

​
Commit–Reveal Voting

Justly uses a commit–reveal voting scheme to protect the integrity of the voting process. Roadmap: integrate Shutter’s API for encrypted commit–reveal with automatic reveal to reduce juror UX friction and improve liveness. The process is divided into two phases:
  • Commit phase:
    Jurors submit a cryptographic commitment to their vote without revealing its value.
  • Reveal phase:
    Jurors reveal their vote, which is verified against the original commitment.
This mechanism:
  • prevents vote copying or coordination,
  • encourages independent decision-making,
  • and protects jurors from external pressure.
The protocol enforces this process automatically and uniformly across all disputes, regardless of tier.

​
Coherent Voting

After all votes are revealed, the protocol determines the final outcome based on the collective decision of the jurors. Jurors are considered to have voted coherently if their vote aligns with the final outcome. Coherent voting is the primary signal used by the protocol to distribute rewards and penalties. Coherence is evaluated exclusively against the final collective outcome, not against external or subjective notions of correctness.

​
Rewards

Jurors who vote coherently are rewarded. Rewards are sourced from:
  • the stakes of jurors who voted incoherently,
  • and predefined dispute fees, depending on the tier.
Rewards are distributed automatically and proportionally according to protocol rules. Reward distribution follows deterministic protocol rules and does not involve discretionary judgment.

​
Penalties

Jurors who vote against the final outcome are penalized. Penalties may include:
  • partial or total loss of the juror’s stake,
  • depending on the dispute type and selected tier.
This mechanism discourages:
  • random voting,
  • low-effort participation,
  • and strategic manipulation.
Penalty application is automatic and applies equally to all jurors under the same dispute conditions.

​
Incentive Alignment

The voting and incentive system is designed so that:
  • honest voting maximizes expected returns,
  • dishonest or careless voting increases economic risk,
  • and long-term participation favors consistent, coherent behavior.
Over time, this creates a juror pool that is economically aligned with fair and reliable dispute resolution. This mechanism allows the juror pool to self-regulate over time without centralized reputation scoring.

​
Automatic Enforcement

All rewards, penalties, and fund transfers are enforced automatically by smart contracts. The protocol does not rely on discretionary intervention, manual arbitration, or centralized control to execute outcomes. This ensures:
  • predictability,
  • transparency,
  • and neutrality across all disputes.
Once executed, outcomes cannot be altered or overridden.