Unbreakable Vows, private contracts arbitrated by Celeste

[sem]

Proposal Information

Propoosal link:

1Hive gardens

Proposal description:

Unbreakable Vows are private legal contracts that can be created and signed by parties to give legitimacy to peer to peer agreements. In the Harry Potter’s Wizarding World, an unbreakable vow is a type of binding magical contract cast between two parties, that if broken by either party, would result in the imminent death of whoever broke the contract. In the web3 world, the party who breaks the vow only loses some collateral (tokens, NFTs, etc).

This proposal is a follow-up of a previous thread in this forum:

Expanding Celeste capabilities

Celeste has been live for many months now but there only have been 3 disputes. I expect that we will see more and more use of it as new gardens (and garden covenants) are created, but still, I don’t think gardens should be the main use of Celeste. It’s concept it’s so interesting that it would be heavily underused if we were only going to use it to dispute votes. I think we should put in the hands of the community the ability to create private contracts that could be resolved using celeste. I’v…

The idea of creating private agreements between people being arbitrated by Celeste received good feedback, so we decided to create a prototype that we presented in Road to Web3 hackathon.

Unbreakable Vows · ETHGlobal Showcase

The demo of the prototype can be used here. Unfortunately, the project did not win any relevant price in the hackathon, although it received very good feedback, and we are already talking with some organizations that could be interested in using it to store their agreements.

These are the missing features in order to have a minimum viable product:

• Finalize the employment agreement and the independent contractor agreement with our lawyer Daniela using the system we will put in place to parse contract templates in markdown into the UI.
• Implement the IDisputable interface so the agreements can be disputed in Celeste.
• Encrypt the agreement texts to only be accessible to the parties until one of them discloses part or all the text. We will do it using Ceramic and IDX.
• Finish the Superfluid integration, so the agreements can have constant flows attached to them.
• Improve the UI and UX.

After completing them, the product could be widely used by the community.

Proposal Rationale

As I explained in the first forum thread, Celeste is much more than a system to dispute Garden DAO votes. It has the capacity to fulfill the Aragon Network vision to create a cryptographically-enforced jurisdiction in which different parties can agree upon any term and connect it with smart contracts (aka ricardian contracts).

This proposal intends to advance in the direction proposed by Aligning on 1Hive direction, Organisational apps take priority, providing new uses to Celeste, and ultimately providing a new use to the Honey token:

Current efforts to make Celeste more widely used include Gardens […]. Beyond this it has been suggested we liase with other DAO’s or crowdsale platforms to see how we can integrate Celeste into their processes. If we can establish applications that rely on Celeste and are used regularly we will create a sustainable demand for Honey.

We think ricardian contracts are the natural next step for 1hive. They are the missing pieces that connect the people (Garden users) and our arbitration system of preference (Celeste). Quests and Unbreakable Vows are two examples of the systems that can formalize the relations between our users and create a strong relational network of agreements that can help holding our community.

Expected duration or delivery date (if applicable):

We expect to have a functional minimum viable product and people using it 4 months after the approval of this proposal (around June or July if the proposal passes during the following days).

Team Information (For Funding Proposals)

Names, usernames, and/or relevant social links for team members (Twitter, Github, 1Hive Forum, etc.):

• Mateo - @mateodaza, Github.
• Daniela - @dafanador, LinkedIn.
• Juan - @juankbell, TEC forum.
• Elessar - @paulo, Github.
• Fiore - @fioreb, Github.
• Sem - @sem, Github.

Skills and previous experience in related or similar work:

• Mateo - Frontend developer at Giveth.io, main developer of Unbreakable Vows.
• Daniela - Practicing lawyer in Colombia, specialized in business law, and experienced in writing contracts among private parties.
• Juan - Conflict resolution management expert, leader of GravityDAO.
• Elessar - Full-stack developer, co-founder of Blossom Labs, his last project was integrating superfluid in aragon client.
• Fiore - Designer and 1hive seed.
• Sem - Solidity developer, co-founder of Blossom Labs, and 1hive seed.

Funding Information (For Funding Proposals)

Amount of HNY requested:

115 HNY (~$20,000 at current price)

Ethereum address where funds shall be transferred:

0x6a252ED89BcB23E63ea21B9B2f8b2b4590629410 (Unbreakable Vows Gnosis Safe)

More detailed description of how funds will be handled and used:

• 57.5 HNY will gradually be transferred to the founder’s addresses as the project reaches the MVP state in order to cover the cost of the development until now. They are not expected to be sold, but used as governance tokens.
• 57.5 HNY will be converted into xDAI in order to pay for the development required to reach an MVP version of the product.

[divine_comedian]

looks very interesting! thanks for the write up Sem
How will Unbreakable vows take form? Could it be an installable Aragon App? How can it be plugged in easily into a Gardens or other Aragon App for participants to view and create vows?

[JuankBell]

We will have regular development calls on Wednesdays at 10 am EST - 4 pm CET on the 1hive discord. Everyone invited! We are working with this agenda: Unbreakable Vows agenda - HackMD

[sem]

Unbreakable Vows will have their own frontend separated from gardens, and we do not envision any integration within the gardens UI, in order to separate responsibilities (gardens manage the common pool funds, unbreakable manages peer-to-peer agreements).

On the other hand, there will be a lot of relation between gardens and unbreakable vows under the hood, as we presumably are going to reuse the dispute resolution system of garden covenants to arbitrate disputes among parties.

In other words, each garden could have unbreakable vows attached to their covenant. In the case of the GIVgarden, for example, the employment agreements of giveth employees could be “extensions” to the covenant. When a dispute arises, it is the giveth covenant with this particular extension what is challenged, providing evidence on a breach on the established terms of the contract.

Unbreakable Vows could also not be attached to any organization, being pure agreements between parties. In this case, the vow would reside in the yet-to-be-properly-named “Unbreakable Vows” garden, which will presumably be the garden with more vows.

[sem]

The proposal is available in the 1hive gardens for voting. We adjusted the amount of HNY requested to adapt it to the current market fluctuations.

[philogy]

Looks awesome, hope you used or at least checked out the Celeste contracts package I made

Makes it easier to develop and test contracts interfacing and using Celeste.

[sem]

The disputable API is great, we are using it for another project that uses Celeste and not directly connected to Gardens.

For Unbreakable Vows we want to reuse the infrastructure that is already developed in Gardens to create agreements and dispute them (as I was describing in the previous message). For this reason we probably won’t end up using it, but thanks for the heads up!

[sem]

Hello, community,

It has been many months since we received the funds for continuing with Unbreakable Vows, and here is our update on how it is going.

First, we would like to thank you for supporting this proposal. Unfortunately, the 1hive situation and the HNY price have changed significantly since February. However, we still have resources, and Unbreakable Vows still has the potential to be a crucial piece to provide new relevant uses to Celeste.

During the last months, we have been working mainly on two fronts: (1) redacting the Contributor Agreement and the Independent Contractor Agreement and (2) designing the flows and the UI of the application.

You can find the two contract templates in these two Markdown files:

• Contributor Agreement
• Provision of Services Agreement

We also designed the different flows of the application, the possible states of the contracts, and how they can be updated or disputed in Celeste.

Here is how contracts will look in the future web app:

New Unbreakable Vows Contract

We also designed the entire flow for disputing a contract in Celeste:

Dispute Unbreakable Vow

We had to cut some of the scope of the initial specification, and decided to leave the contract encryption out of it. Instead, we will focus our resources on validating a simple MVP.

On the treasury side, we spent 52% of our stable coin reserves while keeping half of the HNY as we promised, which lost 90% of its value since we got it. Nevertheless, we still feel confident in releasing an MVP, which we hope we can have before the end of the year. We will accomplish this with the financial support of Blossom Labs . Our contributors also partially accepted equity instead of payment, which alleviates the development cost.

We also want to welcome two new recurrent contributors to the project: Zhenyi, who designed the mockups and is the current project manager, and Luis, who has provided valuable insights into contract writing and finding possible product-market fit.

if you are also interested in de development of this project or just want to say hi, we meet every other Wednesday in the 1hive discord to share updates and coordinate on future work.