The CEO and co-founder of Matter Labs, Alex Gluchowski, has developed an Ethereum court system that mirrors the hierarchical court system existing in the real world.
In a post on X (Twitter) on September 2, Gluchowski suggested an “Ethereum Supreme Court” that would function like the US Supreme Court and be used as a last option by parties to resolve smart contract problems before resorting to a traditional lawyer or court.
According to Gluchowski’s theory, disagreements and urgent upgrades would be handled by the hierarchy of on-chain tribunals. The “Court of Final Appeal” would be an Ethereum layer-1 soft fork, although that would only be a last resort.
Every protocol in this system, according to Gluchowski, would have its own governance, including routine and urgent updating procedures as well as a particular contract that may trigger an appeal.
During the appeals period that follows an emergency protocol update, any user may voice an objection to the higher court. However, they will have to make a specified bail payment.
Each court specifies the higher court to which an appeal should be made, with the appellants’ last resort being the Ethereum Supreme Court, according to Gluchowski.
Two examples of protocols that might contest matters in a court like CourtUnchained or JusticeDAO are Aave and Uniswap. Following the decisions of those courts, a party may appeal to the Ethereum Supreme Court.
Gluchowski acknowledged that a strong societal consensus would be necessary for the on-chain court system to work.
Only “truly extraordinary” instances will be brought before it, he continued, due to the expense.
It must be worthy of the consideration of the entire Ethereum Layer-0 (the social consensus). Consider a big L2 bug, a Defi protocol that poses a systemic risk, etc.
Although Gluchowski acknowledged that there are currently a number of remedies for these problems, he contended that they are ineffective.
For instance, setting time-locked features on smart contracts is inappropriate in emergency scenarios, and creating a security council may be able to lessen the issue but won’t be able to completely address it and comes with its own concerns.
Security councils could only suspend contracts briefly; urgent upgrades required consent from token governance. But today, a majority of underrepresented owners may carry out an unpleasant takeover upgrade, and all the assets may be taken,” he warned.
Gluchowski announced that he and the staff at zkSync, a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum built by Matter Labs, would gladly pay for the proposal’s investigation.
The protection of protocols from outside political inference will be the primary purpose of such a system. It will act as a fantastic deterrent and strengthen Ethereum’s position as a potent network state, according to Gluchowski.
