Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) announced a caller private, on-chain voting instrumentality for Ethereum developers called “Cicada.”
In a blog post, a16z developer Michael Zhu acknowledged existing on-chain voting features but noted that galore of those systems are afloat nationalist and transparent.
Running tally privacy
By offering backstage voting, Cicada addresses issues recovered successful nationalist voting, specified arsenic ballot manipulation and improper elector incentivization.
Cicada specifically allows for moving tally privacy, meaning it conceals the fig of votes for each enactment until voting ends. This attack relies connected time-lock puzzles, which conceal idiosyncratic votes for a acceptable magnitude of time, and homomorphic time-lock puzzles, which harvester the different puzzles and conceal the wide tally.
Zhu said that Cicada could besides beryllium utilized for elector anonymity and ballot privateness with the summation of zero-knowledge radical rank proofs.
Cicada is simply a Solidity library, meaning it is compatible with the programming connection utilized successful Ethereum astute contracts. Zhu said the room is businesslike capable to beryllium utilized connected Ethereum’s mainnet (as opposed to furniture 2 networks).
Real-world usage not recommended
Zhu acknowledged connected Twitter that on-chain voting is not “not acceptable for high-stakes real-world usage cases yet” but expressed anticipation for aboriginal progress.
In the meantime, galore blockchain projects person governance systems that trust connected on-chain voting. For example, Uniswap and different DeFi platforms usage on-chain governance to take which blockchains to deploy to, portion the stablecoin task Maker uses on-chain voting to find the constitution of its reserves and different decisions.
The station Ethereum gets backstage on-chain voting instrumentality done a16z’s ‘Cicada’ appeared archetypal connected CryptoSlate.