Aragon Court Glossary
Find below a list of unique terms that you may encounter when using Aragon Court. You can learn more about these concepts and why they matter to you as an Aragon Court user by reading through the rest of the Aragon Court documentation.
Appeal
When someone disagrees with the preliminary ruling of a dispute, they can challenge the outcome and escalate the dispute to the next round of jury voting. Each appeal round brings in a larger and larger group of guardians until the fourth and final appeal round, when all active guardians are invited to vote on the final ruling.
Aragon Court
A blockchain-based dispute resolution protocol that uses randomly selected guardians to resolve subjective disputes.
Arguments
Text, audio, video, and images put forth to make a case in favor of one of the possible dispute outcomes (Allow, Block, or Refuse to vote).
Commit and reveal voting
When a vote is first committed in secret, and then revealed at a later designated time. This voting mechanism is used to incentivize guardians to select the ruling that they believe a plurality of other guardians will select.
Dispute
When an Aragon Court subscriber believes that a subjective agreement they are party to has been violated and they decide to try to block the disputable action or proposal using Aragon Court.
Draft / Summon guardians
The process of randomly selecting guardians for a new dispute round from the pool of active guardians.
Final ruling
The final ruling of a dispute is one of either:
- The ruling that a plurality of guardians in the current round have voted for, provided there has been no appeal or it is the final appeal round, or
- The ruling proposed by an appealing party, provided that no one challenges the appeal.
Guardian
A participant in the Aragon Court protocol who has locked and activated a specified minimum amount of tokens, making them eligible to be drafted to resolve disputes brought before the court.
Period
Disputes are broken up into multiple periods, which are themselves each made up of a specific number of terms. The periods of a dispute are:
- Argument submission (optional)
- Vote commit
- Vote reveal
- Appeal
- Appeal challenge
Plurality rule
When the winning outcome of a vote is determined by the option that has the most votes, as opposed to majority rule where the winning outcome is determined by the option that has the majority of votes.
Preliminary ruling
The ruling selected by the plurality of guardians in the current dispute round, which may become the final ruling provided there is no appeal.
Rewards
Aragon Court offers financial rewards to users who successfully perform certain actions, such as summoning guardians, appealing preliminary rulings, and voting in favor of the final ruling of a dispute. Some rewards, such as dispute fees, ruling fees, and subscription fees, are only given to active guardians. Other rewards, such as appeal fees and maintenance fees, can be earned by anyone.
Round
Aragon Court disputes are made up of at most five rounds of guardians deliberation. Disputes are escalated from one round to the next only if someone appeals the preliminary ruling and someone else challenges the appeal.
Slash
When a guardian either fails to perform their tasks on time, has their vote leaked, or votes incoherently i.e. against the final ruling, their locked ANT is taken from them ("slashed") and redistributed to guardians who ruled in favor of the final ruling.
Term
The basic unit of time in Aragon Court. One term is equal to 8 hours.