This proposal seeks to create a new court on Gnosis Chain: The “xDai Curation Court (Hidden Voting)”. It will be a parallel version of the existing xDai curation court, with commit and reveal (Hidden voting) enabled. The goal is to reduce vote influence and improve decision integrity based on data collected from a significant increase in disputes on Gnosis Chain last year.
Context
In 2025, the xDai Curation court was the most active court bringing an unprecedented volume of disputes that gave us the opportunity to analyze juror behavior at scale.
One pattern in particular stood out: vote influence. We observed multiple instances where jurors were reacting to how others had already voted rather than forming independent judgments. This kind of herding behavior is well understood in the context of Schelling point games when votes are visible as they are cast, a juror who is uncertain about the correct answer may simply follow the emerging majority rather than reason independently. This mechanism impacts
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Existing ruling: jurors tend to copy each other’s vote.
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Appeals: since previous rulings tend to unanimity, therefore future jurors are more keen to keep voting as in the previous round. As it will be their schelling point.
These points aren’t new. KIP-27 addressed it in the Ethereum mainnet General Court back in 2020, and KIP-42 proposed the same for the xDai General Court in 2021, with the explicit reasoning that “Schelling point assumptions might not hold as strong when it is not possible to appeal and the votes are not hidden while they are being cast.” The xDai Curation court shares many of these characteristics: it handles high-frequency, moderate-stakes disputes where appeal is less common, making the absence of hidden voting more consequential.
Why a New Court Rather Than Modifying the Existing One
As noted in previous proposals, the hiddenVotes parameter cannot be modified after a court has been created. The only way to introduce commit and reveal to the xDai Curation court is therefore to create a new court with hiddenVotes: true. The existing xDai Curation court will remain active, but the intention is for new disputes from curation-related products on Gnosis Chain to be routed to this new court going forward.
Proposal Details
1. Court Name: xDai Curation (Hidden Voting)
2. Parent Court: xDai General Court
3. Court Parameters:
- hiddenVotes: 1 (commit and reveal enabled)
- Proposed juror fee: 7.2
- Proposed minstake: 1400.0 PNK
- Proposed alpha: 0.48
- Jurors for jump: 14
- Times per period: [140400, 291600, 145800, 194400] (Evidence Period, Commit Period, Vote Period, Appeal Period)
Court Policy
The curate court policy will be the same as the Current xDai Curation court : link
Motivation
The decision to propose this court comes from two converging sources of evidence: quantitative data and direct user feedback.
On the data side, the spike in Gnosis Chain disputes in 2025 was significant enough that it gave us a statistically meaningful sample to work with. The analysis points to visible voting as a contributing factor in cases where the outcome distribution looked less like independent judgment and more like cascading agreement. We want to test whether hiding votes during the casting phase changes those outcomes.
On the product side, several jurors and disputing parties have expressed preference for a hidden vote setup. Even if hidden voting does not dramatically shift outcomes, it should improve the perceived legitimacy of the process which matters for participation and trust.
It is worth emphasizing that this is not a replacement for the existing xDai Curation court. It is a new option, and the community will be able to observe over time whether outcomes in this court differ meaningfully from the existing one.
Voting Options
Yes, create the court.
No, rework proposal.