Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Announced a new on-chain private voting tool for Ethereum developers called “Cicada”.
In a blog post, a16z developer Michael Zhu acknowledged existing on-chain voting features, but noted that many of those systems are fully public and transparent.
Account Privacy Enforcement
By offering private voting, Cicada addresses problems found in public voting, such as vote rigging and inadequate voter incentives.
Cicada specifically allows to enforce count privacy, which means that it hides the number of votes for each option until the voting is over. This approach is based on time-lock puzzles, which hide individual votes for a set period of time, and homomorphic time-lock puzzles, which combine the other puzzles and hide the overall count.
Zhu said Cicada could also be used for voter anonymity and ballot privacy with the addition of zero-knowledge group membership testing.
Cicada is a Solidity library, which means that it is compatible with the programming language used in Ethereum smart contracts. Zhu said that the library is efficient enough to be used on the Ethereum mainnet (as opposed to Layer 2 networks).
Not recommended for real world use
zhu recognized on Twitter that chain voting is “not ready yet for high-risk, real-world use cases,” but expressed hope for future progress.
Meanwhile, numerous blockchain projects have governance systems that are based on on-chain voting. For example, Uniswap and other DeFi platforms use on-chain governance to choose which blockchains to implement on, while the stablecoin Maker project uses on-chain voting to determine the composition of its reserves and other decisions.
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