Last month, my perspective was completely overturned by one event.

Two collaborators in the community had a disagreement over task delivery standards, each sticking to their own stance, and the atmosphere was tense. Usually, there are only two outcomes: an administrator steps in to mediate, or the issue ends in a deadlock.

But this time, someone proposed an alternative approach — trying the on-chain dispute resolution mechanism using WAL. To be honest, I was a bit confused at first; I hadn’t really looked into how this system works in detail.

It turns out WAL can act as a "judge," and the process is surprisingly clear:

Both parties stake 50 WAL into an arbitration pool. The system randomly selects 5 community members with mediation experience to form a jury. I was one of them, mainly because I had previously helped mediate several community disputes.

Next, the jurors review the task requirements, examine the deliverables, and go through the communication records between both parties. Then each person votes with WAL to express their judgment. The entire voting process is publicly recorded on-chain, and no one can alter it.

The final vote was 3 to 2, supporting the task publisher’s side.

The interesting part comes afterward. Many people thought the losing side’s 50 WAL would be confiscated, but the WAL mechanism is more sophisticated:

The 50 WAL staked by the losing side are distributed as follows — 30 go to the winner, 10 are allocated to us jurors (I personally received 2), 5 flow into the community insurance fund, and the remaining 5 are burned directly.

At first glance, it seems the losing side lost 30 WAL, but that’s not the whole story. The system records will permanently store that they accepted arbitration and paid on time. This reputation record directly impacts their future cooperation opportunities and influence within the community.

You see, the brilliance of this mechanism is that it’s not purely about winning or losing, but combines economic incentives and credit mechanisms to turn disputes into a process of education and filtering. Staking isn’t punishment; it’s a commitment. The distribution isn’t zero-sum; it ensures that all parties have a sense of participation.