Progress for Private Voting
Private voting is the “real-world” default, and for good reason! Public voting has been problematic for DAOs, creating things like 11th hour problems, vote coercion, and bandwagon effects.
When NounsDAO recognized the need for confidential governance within their own community, Aztec Labs and Aragon ZK Research (AZKR) joined forces to answer the call.
We have now published two final reports on our research results and what’s next for NounsDAO private governance.
🤖 Read the technical report here.
👪 Read the general report here.
In short, our proposal was to provide privacy-first governance, including:
- Anonymity: Each participant is hidden
- Vote confidentiality: Each vote is hidden
- Outcome confidentiality: The outcome of the vote is hidden (other than pass/fail)
Now, at the conclusion of this research sprint, we are presenting our findings in the form of both technical and general reports.
The Aztec team focused on implementing storage proofs in Noir, while AZKR explored the design and implementation of the voting solution powered by these proofs.
In practice, prove that you’re a Noun without saying which Noun you are, then use that proof to vote in the DAO.
The general report also details the primary research questions addressed. TL;DR:
- Is it possible to build a voting system on Ethereum that’s user-friendly, trustless, fair, weighed, and ballot-secret? Yes, very!
- If these properties can’t all be met at the same time, which of them are incompatible, and why? All of them can be met.
- What is needed to make the full combination of properties available to the Nouns community? Present our findings to date + bring TBD multisig and vote aggregation solutions to production.
You can review the code and general report for AZKR’s early roadmap for what is currently called zk-POPVOTE (zk Proof-based On-chain Private Voting), which is a continuation of the project we’ve started together.
🐦 Join the Twitter Spaces we’ll host on September 5th at 12:00 UTC here
At Aztec Labs, we will continue contributing to the development of the Noir programming language, and we look forward to building privacy-preserving infrastructure to empower private governance.
Resource List
- Read the technical report.
- Read the general report.
- Read Aragon’s announcement blog.
- Check out the code in GitHub.
- Join the Twitter Space on September 5th at 12:00 UTC.
- Get started with Noir — the universal language of ZK.
Meet Aztec and build with us
Aztec is a first-of-its-kind public-private hybrid zkRollup bringing together the best of Ethereum smart contracts and encrypted execution.
It is a culmination of Aztec Labs’ long-term vision: a collectively-owned, fully decentralized L2 on Ethereum with encryption as a first class citizen.
We at Aztec Labs are thrilled to be able to build this together with you, and we can’t wait to see you in the forum.
Join our team
Aztec Labs is on the lookout for talented engineers, cryptographers, and business people to accelerate our vision of encrypted Ethereum.
If joining our mission to bring scalable privacy to Ethereum excites you, check out our open roles.
