Nation States, Local governments, Corporations, Communities, and DAOs, are all Cardano’s potential customers. That’s pretty much everyone on earth.
Most every organization on the planet needs cost effective, customizable, easy to use voting systems which are anonymous, verifiable, scalable, don’t leak, and most importantly are trustless and decentralized so that citizens can believe the election results.
Blockchain is the natural choice because it can link public decisions with the movement of treasury funds.
This is why I believe voting dApps will drive world wide crypto adoption. Lets get there first.
This tech will be ready on the Mina blockchain very soon.
Mina is a recursive zero knowledge proof blockchain which uses Cardano’s Ouroboros consensus mechanism. It supports anonymous smart contracts and the blockchain always stays the same size because the proofs are recursive.
IOG’s research department is moving fast.
Dr Vanishree Rao, formerly of Mina, is now Head of Applied Cryptography at IOG.
Emergo is hosting a zero knowledge proof hackathon.
Will developers be ready when the new tools arrive?
IOG smart contract education is the very best there is.
Much thanks to our hard working educators at IOG.
My hope is that our IOG educators will have course materials for building voting systems ready even before a recursive zero knowledge proof blockchain arrives as an L2 on Cardano.
Every organization is unique so developers will need to produce many unique voting systems using the tools provided. We need to be ready when the tools arrive if we want to establish Cardano as the best protocol for running elections.
The community can start to get ready now.
The following is a high level look and voting system architecture using zkSnarks:
The Mina Blockchain
SnarkyJS: A framework for building ZKP dApps.
A sample voting system
A sample voting system
Here is what I am doing to get ready:
My main interest is building a voting system for Cardano designed to handle political elections and which removes the perverse incentives found in humanity’s early versions of democracy. To this end I am looking to see how evolution implements collective decision making and have learned that it tends to converge on a particular structure most plainly seen in honey bee colonies. I figure our own governance will likely converge on this structure as well and that we could shorten the time it takes to achieve this optimum decision making engine simply by looking at what the bees are doing and then applying those functions to our own governance. Snarkyjs will be used to write the zkApp until our own domain specific language is available on Cardano and Mina will function as the sidechain until we have our own recursive zero knowledge L2 on Cardano. The following is a link to what has been worked out so far.
Credit goes to the bees.
Eventually, Cardano will likely have thousands of voting systems running on the chain.
I can’t wait to get started.