Justly
Decentralized justice for payments on digital platforms
📍 Team Location: Argentina
About the Product
Justly’s solution consists of a neutral and programmable arbitration protocol that replaces manual customer support and centralized moderation with a system based on economic incentives, game theory, and on-chain execution.
Below is the dispute resolution flow and the role of smart contracts in enforcing the process.
- The Dispute Resolution Flow
The protocol follows a deterministic lifecycle designed to ensure disputes progress reliably and resolve within bounded time.
Dispute Creation:
When a conflict arises (for example, a freelance payment dispute), the integrating application creates a dispute by calling the Justly arbitration contract. The dispute specifies the parties, the selected court configuration, and a reference to the evidence.
Funding:
The arbitration fee must be fully covered before the dispute becomes active. Any actor may cover the fees, but payment does not grant procedural rights.
Evidence Submission:
During the evidence phase, the parties submit supporting information. Evidence is typically stored off-chain and referenced on-chain through hashes or external links. Once the evidence window closes, the record is frozen.
Juror Selection:
After evidence closes, the protocol selects jurors from the staked pool associated with the chosen court. Selection is stake-weighted and permissionless to trigger. A selection timeout ensures the dispute continues even if the target number of jurors is not fully reached.
Judgment and Voting (Commit-Reveal):
Jurors review the evidence and submit votes through a commit–reveal process. Votes are committed as hashes and revealed later to prevent collusion and vote manipulation.
Resolution and Closing:
The protocol computes the majority outcome, finalizes the ruling, and settles juror incentives according to the court parameters.
- The Role of Smart Contracts
In Justly, smart contracts provide the trust and enforcement layer for the arbitration process. They perform several critical functions that cannot safely rely on centralized systems.
Dispute Escrow and Process Enforcement:
Smart contracts manage dispute activation, enforce deadlines, and ensure that once a dispute begins, the process follows predefined rules that cannot be altered by either party.
Programmatic Ruling Execution:
Once the dispute is finalized, the ruling becomes available to the integrating application through a standard interface or optional callback, allowing the external protocol to automatically apply the outcome.
Incentive and Penalty Settlement:
The protocol automatically distributes rewards and penalties based on the voting outcome. Jurors who vote coherently receive rewards, while incoherent or inactive jurors may lose part of their stake.
Transparency and Auditability:
All arbitration rules, court parameters, and final rulings are executed and recorded on-chain. This allows any participant or integrator to verify that disputes were resolved according to predefined rules.
- Why Stellar
Currently, the Stellar ecosystem does not have a dedicated decentralized arbitration protocol. As more financial and marketplace applications are built on Soroban, dispute resolution becomes an important missing infrastructure component.
Justly aims to fill this gap by providing a neutral arbitration layer that any Stellar-based application can integrate for resolving conflicts involving payments, escrow, or digital agreements.
Building this protocol on Stellar also enables direct integration with other ecosystem projects, including payment applications, marketplaces, and on-chain financial services. These integrations allow disputes to be resolved within the same infrastructure where transactions occur.
By developing this arbitration protocol early in the Soroban ecosystem, Justly has the opportunity to become a foundational component for dispute resolution on Stellar, helping enable safer and more reliable on-chain commerce.
In summary: Justly provides a decentralized arbitration layer that applications can integrate to resolve disputes automatically, using smart contracts to guarantee fair execution, transparent incentives, and reliable settlement.
Problem & Solutions
Problem
Justly solves the massive operational burden and reputational risk faced by digital platforms currently acting as "judge and jury" in frequent, low-value disputes, where internal human support is too slow, costly, and impossible to scale.
This problem is:
Frequent: Disputes in marketplaces, fintechs, and service platforms occur daily as an inevitable byproduct of growth.
Painful: It forces companies to maintain non-scalable support teams, introduces bias into decision-making, and freezes user funds, leading to immediate churn. Valioso: Al delegar la resolución en una capa neutral y automatizada, las empresas reducen sus gastos legales y operativos, restaurando la confianza en el ecosistema sin ser responsables del juicio subjetivo
Solution
Justly’s solution consists of a neutral and programmable arbitration protocol that replaces manual customer support and centralized moderation with a system based on economic incentives, game theory, and on-chain execution.
Below is the dispute resolution flow and the role of smart contracts in enforcing the process.
- The Dispute Resolution Flow
The protocol follows a deterministic lifecycle designed to ensure disputes progress reliably and resolve within bounded time.
Dispute Creation:
When a conflict arises (for example, a freelance payment dispute), the integrating application creates a dispute by calling the Justly arbitration contract. The dispute specifies the parties, the selected court configuration, and a reference to the evidence.
Funding:
The arbitration fee must be fully covered before the dispute becomes active. Any actor may cover the fees, but payment does not grant procedural rights.
Evidence Submission:
During the evidence phase, the parties submit supporting information. Evidence is typically stored off-chain and referenced on-chain through hashes or external links. Once the evidence window closes, the record is frozen.
Juror Selection:
After evidence closes, the protocol selects jurors from the staked pool associated with the chosen court. Selection is stake-weighted and permissionless to trigger. A selection timeout ensures the dispute continues even if the target number of jurors is not fully reached.
Judgment and Voting (Commit-Reveal):
Jurors review the evidence and submit votes through a commit–reveal process. Votes are committed as hashes and revealed later to prevent collusion and vote manipulation.
Resolution and Closing:
The protocol computes the majority outcome, finalizes the ruling, and settles juror incentives according to the court parameters.
- The Role of Smart Contracts
In Justly, smart contracts provide the trust and enforcement layer for the arbitration process. They perform several critical functions that cannot safely rely on centralized systems.
Dispute Escrow and Process Enforcement:
Smart contracts manage dispute activation, enforce deadlines, and ensure that once a dispute begins, the process follows predefined rules that cannot be altered by either party.
Programmatic Ruling Execution:
Once the dispute is finalized, the ruling becomes available to the integrating application through a standard interface or optional callback, allowing the external protocol to automatically apply the outcome.
Incentive and Penalty Settlement:
The protocol automatically distributes rewards and penalties based on the voting outcome. Jurors who vote coherently receive rewards, while incoherent or inactive jurors may lose part of their stake.
Transparency and Auditability:
All arbitration rules, court parameters, and final rulings are executed and recorded on-chain. This allows any participant or integrator to verify that disputes were resolved according to predefined rules.
- Why Stellar
Currently, the Stellar ecosystem does not have a dedicated decentralized arbitration protocol. As more financial and marketplace applications are built on Soroban, dispute resolution becomes an important missing infrastructure component.
Justly aims to fill this gap by providing a neutral arbitration layer that any Stellar-based application can integrate for resolving conflicts involving payments, escrow, or digital agreements.
Building this protocol on Stellar also enables direct integration with other ecosystem projects, including payment applications, marketplaces, and on-chain financial services. These integrations allow disputes to be resolved within the same infrastructure where transactions occur.
By developing this arbitration protocol early in the Soroban ecosystem, Justly has the opportunity to become a foundational component for dispute resolution on Stellar, helping enable safer and more reliable on-chain commerce.
In summary: Justly provides a decentralized arbitration layer that applications can integrate to resolve disputes automatically, using smart contracts to guarantee fair execution, transparent incentives, and reliable settlement.
Customer Segments
B2B Clients: Digital Platforms These include Marketplace (E-commerce) companies, Freelance platforms, Fintech/Wallet apps, and Web3 Protocols (DAOs). The Goal: These platforms use the service to scale their operations without relying on manual, human-led support.
Paying Customers: Disputing Parties The service fees are paid by the Claimer and the Defender within a platform (e.g., a buyer and a seller, or a client and a freelance developer). Note: It is still to be determined if the digital platforms will also act as paying parties.
Jurors (The Supply of Judgment) Independent users, technical experts, or stablecoin (USDC) holders who act as "justice workers." The Incentive: Jurors are compensated for providing the necessary human judgment to resolve cases.
Summary:
- Platforms integrate the service to automate dispute resolution and reduce overhead.
- Disputing parties pay for the right to a neutral, fair outcome.
- Jurors earn fees for providing their expertise and labor.