Context

A is an artist who creates digital art of sea shells floating in space. A also uploads her art on Instagram. B is a frequent NFT user. B sees A's art and decides to tokenise it and list it for sale in an NFT Marketplace Artation, without A's consent and with the intention of wrongfully gaining profit from the same. B calls it seas-shells

A's friend G, a collector on Artnation see's A's art and notifies her. Upset and furious, A tries to contact Artnation to take down A's art. Since A is an amateur and fairly unknown artist, and as B is a frequent user of its Artnation's platform, Artnation says it would take time for them to verify the claims.

Worried, A consults a lawyer on possible remedies. The lawyer informs A that she may initiate a case in Court against both Artnation and B. However, since A lives in Kathmandu and Artnation is registered in San Jose, the costs and complications arising out of this would be high. Alternatively, A could have the dispute resolved via cheaper and more time sensitive arbitration, as the terms and conditions of Artnation provides for this. However, the terms also mandate the arbitration to be conducted in the US, and 1000s of dollars to be paid in travel, accommodation and arbitration administration fee, which A cannot afford.

Disillusioned, A decides to wait for Artnation to get back, at the mercy of their discretionary power to grant remedies.

Resolutio to the rescue

Resolutio is a blockchain-based dispute resolution mechanism for NFTs. It is built on Algorand. It is a great alternative to the current arbitration process that is costly, lengthy and extremely cumbersome. Resolutio aims to make the dispute resolution process affordable to the artists, faster and secure to a great extent.

Proposed Mechanism

In Resolutio platform, A has the liberty to have their issue heard and resolved by the NFT Community in a faster, cheaper and secured way. In a higher level, the mechanism consists of the following steps.

Artist A logs into the Platform using their wallet

A stakes an amount using Algorand Standard Asset (ASA) and raises an issue for initiating the dispute resolution process

A provides the following information in support of their claim

Description of the NFT in question

Name of the NFT

Status of the NFT (listed/sold/pending etc.)

Provides proof of it's origin including when and how it was created

Nature of dispute

As example, Their artwork was tokenised without their consent and listed in the NFT Marketplace

The date the alleged theif (B) minted the NFT

Whether B has been notified and warned. If yes, how they responded to the warning.

Link to alleged party's profile in the NFT platform

Notification sent to alleged party B notifying that there is a dispute resolution claimed against them

Resolusio platform mandates a reply from B addressing the claim within a pre-defined deadline. The response is recieved by the platform once sent by B.

Summary of dispute is sent to NFT Community

Arbitrators are randomly selected using Verifiable Random Function

The stake sent from artist A will be splitted between the selected arbitrators. However, the group transaction will not be complete until all the arbitrators cast their votes for or against the artist. The artist can take their stake back at any times before the group transaction is complete.

Majority vote will decide who won the resolution case. If the artist A wins, either the NFT has to be returned, burnt or A will have to be compensated through Algorand Standard Asset (ASA).

How is IPFS/Filecoin used in this project?

We have used IPFS storage to securely store the Dispute Resolution claim evidence and securely share them with the selected arbiters. We used nft.storage as the decentralised storage. Below is an example of our evidence file in nft.storage. https://bafybeiclpu3wxd2pjcr5e2ebltznddbxabvdog6hyigqnnpafegvmkjnlm.ipfs.dweb.link/

Codebase

apps app/ directory contains the scripts for the prototype. Please run index.html to get started.

codes codes/ directory containes the codes for creating accounts, funding through Algo Dispenser and making transactions to Testnet. nft_minting.py is used for minting the evidence as an asset on Algorand.