Valora Protocol

We present Valora, a decentralized protocol for scientific claim validation. Valora creates binary prediction markets for falsifiable scientific hypotheses, enabling participants to stake capital on anticipated empirical outcomes. Markets are priced continuously via a constant-product AMM; settlement is triggered by reputation-weighted oracle attestations that bridge peer-reviewed evidence onchain. A native token ($VLR) coordinates validator incentives, governance rights, and liquidity provisioning.

We demonstrate that truth-aligned incentive structures — where capital gain is conditioned on predictive accuracy — produce price signals that outperform conventional bibliometric measures as early indicators of scientific consensus. We describe the protocol architecture, security assumptions, and tokenomic model, and evaluate attack vectors including adversarial validation, oracle manipulation, and Sybil resistance.

Science advances through falsification. A hypothesis gains credibility not through assertion but through surviving attempts at disproof. Yet the institutional structures that mediate scientific credibility — peer review, citation indices, replication culture — are systematically misaligned with this foundational principle.

Peer review is slow: the median time from submission to publication in high-impact journals exceeds 200 days [1]. It is gatekept: access to the review process is determined by editor discretion and institutional affiliation. And it is incentive- misaligned: reviewers are unpaid volunteers whose career advancement is indexed to publication volume, not predictive accuracy.

The replication crisis of the 2010s made these failures quantitative. Estimates suggest that fewer than 50% of published psychology findings replicate under independent conditions [2]. Similar failures have been documented in medicine [3], economics [4], and molecular biology [5].

"Science is not a body of knowledge but a method of inquiry. Valora is an attempt to make that method legible to markets."

Prediction markets offer an alternative epistemology. By conditioning financial gain on accurate forecasting, they aggregate distributed information about future states more efficiently than centralized expert panels [6, 7]. Valora applies this mechanism to the domain of scientific claims — creating what we term a Scientific Truth Market (STM).

We identify three structural problems in the current scientific validation pipeline:

The Valora protocol consists of four interacting subsystems:

ClaimRegistry stores the canonical set of active claims as EVM structs. Each claim is immutable after a 48-hour challenge window; only status transitions are permissioned writes.

MarketAMM implements a CPMM with dynamic fee adjustment. Liquidity is seeded by the claim proposer and supplemented by protocol reserves. Fee revenue is split 80/20 between treasury and validators.

SettlementEngine collects signed attestations from bonded validators. It applies the reputation-weighted vote aggregation formula and executes settlement if a supermajority threshold (⅔) is reached within the evidence window.

ReputationModule maintains per-validator accuracy scores. Scores decay with inactivity and are updated after each settlement via an exponential moving average.

A claim transitions through the following states:

The validation engine implements reputation-weighted attestation aggregation. Let V = {v₁, v₂, … vₙ} be the set of bonded validators and let rᵢ ∈ [0, 1] denote the reputation score of validator vᵢ. The weighted vote outcome is:

Settlement proceeds as YES if Score(YES) ≥ 0.67, as NO if Score(YES) ≤ 0.33, and escalates to arbitration otherwise.

Reputation is updated after each settlement:

Where α = 0.15 is the learning rate, weighted by the log-volume of the settled market. High-volume markets exert greater reputational pressure than low-liquidity claims.

Sybil Resistance

Validator eligibility requires bonding ≥1,000 $VLR. Reputation is non-transferable and non-purchasable — it accumulates only through correct attestation. A Sybil attacker who creates many low-reputation validators gains negligible voting power relative to their cost, since weight is proportional to reputation, not headcount.

$VLR is the native utility and governance token of the Valora protocol. Total supply is capped at 1,000,000,000 VLR.

Utility Loops

Valora governance is implemented via an on-chain Governor contract inspired by OpenZeppelin Governor. The governance lifecycle is:

Threat Model

We consider the following adversarial capabilities:

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