Project Name
Shielded Voting by Shutter Network
Project Description
Problem
Voting is the backbone of DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation) decision-making. web3 voting mechanisms aim to be transparent & verifiable. However, these same voting mechanisms also suffer from voter apathy, manipulation, and lack of privacy - which can lead to unrepresentative outcomes and compromised governance systems. Examples of web3 voting going wrong:
- A DAO voter might be discouraged from voting or from forming an opinion if it seems that the vote is moving early in one direction.
- A malicious actor might wait for a vote to play out. Only to come in at the last minute, borrowing/buying just the right amount of tokens needed to sway the vote. And doing this at a time when there’s no more time for the rest of the community to react.
Solution
Shielded Voting Shielded Voting addresses these challenges by using threshold encryption. In a nutshell: During the vote, the voting platform only displays the total amount of voting power already deployed. After the vote, the voting platform displays all votes, including how each person voted.
Advantages
- Pre-voting information symmetry
- Enhanced confidentiality, fairness and censorship resistance
- Protection against vote manipulation by large token holders
- Improved user experience
Impact
Shielded Voting on Snapshot, provides partial privacy, ensuring a fair and transparent voting environment for DAOs.
It is now the preferred voting setup of Snapshot. Shielded Voting on Snapshot is currently used by 382 unique communities. It has protected over 2,330 proposals and 216,805 cast votes.
Public Good
Shutter Network offers Shielded Voting to all communities on Snapshot completely free of charge. Shutter Network also hopes to offer Shielded Voting to communities on other voting platforms like Kleros and Fractal in the near future.
Open Source
Shutter Network committed to building open source technology. Shutter Network is and has always been an open source project and open protocol. Here is our Github repo GitHub - shutter-network/shutter: Prevent frontrunning and malicious MEV on Ethereum by using a threshold cryptography-based distributed key generation (DKG) protocol..
Advancing Values of Freedom, Privacy and Decentralisation
Shielded Voting is specifically created to increase integrity in DAO voting. We do not engage in surveillance and we do not handle personal data.
Past Funding
brainbot incubated Shutter Network and has been the primary funder so far. However, in Jan 2024, brainbot will be hand over Shutter Network to the community. From then on, Shutter Network will be managed by a future Shutter DAO.
brainbot gmbh is a for-profit company in Germany. We are a venture builder that has been building on Ethereum since 2014. It contributed to the original Python client in 2014 & to state channel technology in 2018. Some of our ventures are for-profit and others non-profit. We fund our work via consulting, grants, and private token sales.
Shutter Network has 2 applications: Shielded Voting (which is seeking funding here) and Encrypted Mempools for Base Layer Neutrality (i.e. malicious MEV prevention and censorship resistance) (which is not seeking funding here).
Shielded Voting is a non-profit application of Shutter Network. We have never charged for this service and we have no plans to do so.
Mempools for Base Layer Neutrality is not live yet. We are working on a Shutterized Gnosis Chain and several Shutterized Ethereum L2s. We have not determined whether or not to charge for this service. (brainbot has received a OPstack builders grant worth 30k OP for a research/feasibility study and a demo for MEV Prevention solution integrated into the OPStack.)
For both applications, Shutter Network needs to incentivise the keypers (who encrypt and decrypt) and a future Shutter DAO (which selects and manages) the keypers. The exact specifications of that incentive model will be up to a Shutter DAO to decide upon.
Seeking Funding for General Operations
Shutter Network is looking for funds to support the maintenance of Shielded Voting on Snapshot and the integration of shielded voting to other web3 governance mechanisms like Kleros, Fractal and others.
Team
Luis Bezzenberger - Project Manager
Jannik Luhn - Lead Developer
Maximilian Langenfeld - Developer
Loring Harkness - Partnerships
Jakub Al Soori - Biz Dev
Links / Social Credibility
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/shutter.network
Shielded Voting has already been deployed. Github repo: GitHub - shutter-network/shutter: Prevent frontrunning and malicious MEV on Ethereum by using a threshold cryptography-based distributed key generation (DKG) protocol.
Shielded Voting was integrated with Snapshot in 2022 (Shielded voting is live! — Snapshot Labs) & it’s now the default voting setup.
Discord Contact
Loring (loringharkness)