A Borderless, Trustless Civil System
We find ourselves living in a world growing smaller.
We possess technology allowing us to send money instantly and without intermediaries, video chat with a relative a thousand miles away, but what do we have ensuring legal recourse across borders? How do we trust someone we may not know? We don’t have to.
PAID Network is the world’s first borderless legal system powered by DeFi and built on Polkadot. PAID’s vision is to redefine and revolutionize the current legal system and how people engage with it.
The Current Climate
Our current legal system is overly complex, requiring expensive legal counsel to do something as simple as drafting an agreement between two parties. These legal fees are often cost-prohibitive, creating high barriers to entry for legal services and ultimately forcing us to forfeit valuable opportunities or compromise on our better judgement on what we know is right.
Take, for example, the act of making a business introduction at a conference, via email or otherwise. To guarantee compensation from such a referral is neither possible nor enforceable in the conventional legal system, and the pursuing compensation for referrals is usually more trouble than it’s worth. Creating tangible value for referrals is the goal of PAID, guaranteeing you compensation for the introductions you make for others.
Arbitration is just as complicated as an effective referral system in the traditional legal environment, and considerably more restrictive. Agreements stipulate the jurisdiction in which arbitration will take place, should a dispute arise. We can see how this would have made sense in the past, but with globalization and decentralized business models asserting dominance, we have to move forward. We see an increasing amount of cross-border transactions lacking innovation in their facilitation and security
Enter PAID
The platform we designed with efficiency and cost-effectiveness as our top priority. PAID minimizes the expensive, unnecessary, and relatively inaccessible services of legal counsel, eliminating the friction between fragmented jurisdictions and conflicting national legislation. PAID is empowering the community through equal opportunities created by decentralized financial toolsets. Our ultimate goal is to ensure you get PAID.
Fuel for the Fire
Research conducted by the Research Excellence Framework in co-operation with the European Commission in 2014 highlights the following:
“The underpinning research, in this case, examines how cross-border commercial and consumer disputes can be solved using internet technology as an alternative to national courts. Building on existing research on Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), the research examined how ADR can be applied specifically in an online context and has had a significant impact on legal practitioners, policymakers and governments. This is a new field of research. The work has been used by the European Commission to draft the first European legislation on Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) and has informed the approach taken by policy-makers in the UK to implement this legislation. It has also critically shaped the discussion of ODR in international, regional, and national organizations.”
https://impact.ref.ac.uk/casestudies/CaseStudy.aspx?Id=18046
PAID has its Place
PAID is solving a significant problem for all conducting business, both locally and across borders. The most famous civil case PAID would have facilitated seamlessly and without fuss is that of Ray Kroc and the McDonald brothers.
After Ray Kroc stumbled across the brother’s restaurant in 1954, he was so impressed and volunteered to franchise it for them. The brothers were wary at first, but with a background as a door to door salesman, Ray eventually had them in agreement. The problem was that this was a gentlemen’s agreement, a handshake. Things started smoothly, but as the money began flowing, disagreements over almost everything began causing business and personal issues amongst the three men.
The gentlemen’s agreement included royalty fees of 0.5% with the brothers retaining the business’ naming rights. In 1971, Ray Kroc found a legal loophole allowing him to re-incorporate the company and take complete control and naming rights, forcing the brothers into a measly sellout of just $2.7 million.
Relatives told the daily mail in 2015 that Ray also cheated them out of their 0.5% royalty fee, which would have been worth around $305 million in 2012.
The McDonald brothers are the fast-food equivalents of Tyler and Cameron Winkelvoss, the twins who claim Mark Zuckerberg stole the Facebook idea from them. The Winkelvoss twins eventually did get a settlement, but the Mc Donald family was not so lucky.
Had this agreement between Facebook and the McDonald brothers been drawn up, escrowed, and arbitrated on the PAID network, social media and fast food as we know it may have been very different.
The PAID Protocol
The proof is in the protocol and that is what makes our infrastructure and service offering so unique and valuable. PAID will deliver utility across the following areas:
SMART Agreements
Drafting, executing and enforcing an agreement in today’s traditional landscape requires expensive, complicated procedures filled with unnecessary complex clauses. PAID has designed simplified SMART Agreement templates prioritizing deliverables associated with business agreements.
PAID removes the complex verbiage of traditional agreements, eliminating the need for expensive legal counsel. PAID has consulted with a network of legal professionals to meet the requirements for a formal, traditional legal agreement, setting a new standard of simplicity that allows anyone to understand, confidently sign, or arbitrate an agreement.
Users can access PAID’s SMART Agreements through a subscription and staking model via PAID DApp, tremendously reducing cost and service barriers.
Arbitration
Simplicity in PAID’s SMART Agreements serves two purposes.
First, it allows interacting parties to clearly understand all terms and conditions stipulated without the need for legal counsel.
Second, in the event of a dispute, the agreement can be easily interpreted by our community of arbitrators to where a swift judgment can be made, with arbitration fees equally distributed among participating arbitrators.
DeFi
Business agreements often entail much more than a single contract, such as escrow, insurance, lending, borrowing, arbitration and so on. In order to offer a complete product, PAID will feature a suite of DeFi products. These DeFi products add value to our users through their ability to complete the process from beginning to end in a single app. They also create incredible value for our community to participate in these historically high-performing offerings.
All services offered in the ecosystem will be payable using the PAID token.
Staking Pools on PAID
- A set of smart contracts allowing users to deposit and stake the respective amount of PAID tokens relative to the node type they selected and the benefits they wish to receive.
- Pool participants can withdraw token-staking rewards up to the time of the most recently mined block. This can be executed through the “redeem reward” function on the platform.
- Staking pool contracts are used as references to verify and validate stakers permissions needed to participate in and collect fees for:
- Arbitration
- Escrow
- Lending
- Insurance
- DAICO Rewards
Insurance
PAID’s insurance offering allows users peace of mind when interacting with the protocol and fellow users. When entering agreements, full or partial insurance can be purchased to cover the contract in question. Users can also provide insurance coverage as a means to earn returns.
- Insurance contracts enable PAID token stakers to participate in insurance pools.
- Insurance pools comprise groups of individuals who wish to provide insurance coverage, collecting returns from premium payments made by policyholders.
- A corresponding proportion of insurance premium payments will be paid to each pool participant, depending on each individual’s contribution to the insurance pool. In the event of an insurance claim, the pool is responsible for disbursing the claim amount. This would be deducted from the total pool and each individual will receive their proportionate amount.
Lending
Escrow, borrowing and lending will be facilitated through a decentralized, P2P marketplace within the PAID platform. Users can submit, accept and decline requests for loans based on stipulated terms and conditions. Should these terms be unsatisfactory, users can enter into a negotiation phase.
- In the instances where escrow is required and the benefactor does not have the available funds at the time of signing to cover the required escrow amount, the benefactor can submit a loan request to the community of PAID stakers by submitting their requirements, amounts, terms and conditions.
- These loan requests will be reviewed by token stakers, to assess the level of interest and the associated risk of the loan based on the loan terms and the borrower’s reputation score. Stakers can then choose to accept the proposed loan terms, or make a counteroffer if they find the proposed terms to be unacceptable.
Escrow
Escrow services in a decentralized, trustless ecosystem play a vital role in ensuring its success. Having peace of mind when conducting cross-border business, potentially unfamiliar business contacts is a top priority in the modern world.
- Escrow services allow benefactors to guarantee payments as required by SMART agreement beneficiaries. Escrow funds are held in smart contracts and will require both parties’ (benefactors and beneficiaries) consent to authorize release of the funds.
- In the event of a dispute, or the refusal by either party to release funds, the agreement settlement would enter into arbitration where the community of arbitrators would determine the outcome.
- Arbitration fees would be deducted from the escrowed funds before being distributed to the winning party.
DAICOs
Blockchain projects often rely on community-driven, public fundraising in order to raise the capital they need. Today’s current industry methods leave no room for accountability, progress monitoring or assessment of roadmap deliverables. These traditional methods do not sufficiently mitigate risk. PAID seeks to set a new standard for blockchain project funding.
- PAID allows for simplified launches of DAICOs.
- PAID’s DAICO launch contracts allow stakers to launch DAICOs by simply using a “launch” function on the platform, along with the offer parameters.
- The parameters to be stipulated are basic token supply metrics, amount to be raised, and details such as purchase price and vesting period, roadmap milestones and funding release schedule.
- Upon a successful raise, all funds will be held in smart contracts and will be distributed to the company based upon the established fund release schedule.
- Community members who participate in fundraising have the ability to intervene at any point, if they believe the progress of the project is in question. This can be done through submitting an audit request to the PAID DAICO community.
- Upon approval of the audit request, all project funds will be locked via a smart contract-based vote and no additional funding will be released to the company until the audit is completed.
- If the progress is determined to be sufficient, the funds will be unlocked and the project can continue to access the allotted funds based on the release schedule. If the project does not pass the audit and is determined not to be delivered as promised, a remedy will be decided through a community vote.
- The project will then either enter into a probationary period with the opportunity to rectify the issues, or lose access to all remaining funding, after which time said funding would be proportionally redistributed back to the fundraising participants.
Reputation Scoring
PAID has implemented immutable, on-chain reputation scoring as a means to score and monitor users and their interactions with the protocol. This allows a transparent platform for users to make informed decisions about who they do business with.
PAID makes use of Decentralized Digital Identities (DID) for its on-chain, immutable reputation scoring system. Once a user creates a PAID profile and verifies their identity, they will be assessed and assigned a reputation score starting at zero. This reputation score will increase or decrease based on feedback from the network with which they do business.
In order to ensure that individuals are unable to create a new user profile if they receive negative feedback on an existing profile, PAID profiles will require digital identity verification including biometric signatures to ensure the integrity of the reputation system. Subsequently, duplicate biometric signatures will be identified, and blocked from creating new profiles.
Users who faithfully and consistently adhere to terms in their business agreements would accrue a positive reputation over time, gained by the positive feedback from their business transactions.
This allows other users to clearly evaluate the trustworthiness and integrity of their prospective business contacts.
Conversely, if a user consistently violates the terms of their agreements and is frequently embroiled in contract disputes, their digital reputation score will decrease. This will make user behavior transparent to the rest of the community, thereby allowing users to accurately assess the trustworthiness of potential business contacts, reducing their risk.
Governance
In order to seamlessly facilitate the aforementioned features, PAID’s platform requires a complex technical design composed of contracts and SMART Agreements.
- PAID token holders have the largest influence in governance, and hence steer the future opportunities of the entire PAID ecosystem.
- In order to participate in future governance opportunities, token holders are required to hold a minimum number of tokens to submit proposals, while all token holders are able to vote according to their proportionate token holdings.
- The PAID token’s intrinsic value stems from its ability to enable holders to influence and direct the evolution and development of the ecosystem as a whole.
Where do we go from here?
It is clear that the utility realized through PAID will change the way we do business.
Covid-19 has played a pivotal role in catalysing the shift to a decentralised business world. We now find ourselves in the middle of a global marketplace, with many unanswered questions remaining about eventual outcomes. PAID ensures transition into this new way of doing business is as seamless, simple and stress free as possible. PAID will ensure that the transition into this new way of doing business is smooth, efficient, and elegantly simple.
For any questions please feel free to reach out to us on:
Website: https://paidnetwork.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/paidnetwork
Twitter: https://twitter.com/paid_network
Medium: https://medium.com/@Paidnetwork
