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Ethereum-Based DAOs Can Now Leverage A16z’ Cicada Voting System

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Ethereum-Based DAOs Can Now Leverage A16z’ Cicada Voting System
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Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz recently released a new voting system. An Ethereum-based Solidity library dubbed Cicada will not let the voting choice or related information be revealed.

In a blog post on May 24, A16z engineer Michale Zhu explained the working of Cicada, focusing on “private on-chain voting using time-lock puzzles.” The post suggests the library uses a “homomorphic” time-lock puzzle mechanism.

A cryptography method which encrypts the “secret values” for a certain time period. The content can be decrypted only after a specific time has passed. In addition to keeping the secret value content intact, Zhu stated, the system would leverage Semaphore like zero-knowledge group membership.

With the implementation, the whole system would then be able to keep the voter’s identity and other related information completely hidden. Primarily, the technology is based on time-lock puzzles introduced in 1996 and has been used for different purposes since then.

However, users were required to disclose the secret values after the time limit gets up. This could become a shortcoming and need to be eliminated if used for voting systems. For instance, the data or values would also get unreachable after the submission of votes. Users’ voters or users go offline, making it uncountable and the whole process going in vain.

Cryptographers Guilio Malavolta and Aravind Thyagarajan introduced the concept of a “homomorphic” time-lock puzzle mechanism in 2019. The newly proposed system has allowed the adding of puzzles together in order to produce a final puzzle. The puzzle then would be relatively easier to solve in comparison to solving the sum of several individual puzzles earlier.

At the end of this process, the final result reveals only the whole sum of all the individual values rather than disclosing the individual values included in the sum.

The notion of decentralization means to become the most democratic. In the ecosystem, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) use the democratic system of voting in support or against the proposals.

The system had an issue because it needed a boolean value of 1 or 0 to encode. By exploiting the voter’s identity or credentials, hackers could encode the value to 100. To safeguard the process at the voters’ end, users would need to submit zero-knowledge ballot validity proof in Cicada every time a ballot is submitted.

It ensures the vote’s encode and credibility while preventing its contents from being revealed. The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is known for its investments across industries from biotech to blockchain to gaming to healthcare, etc. The firm reportedly holds an amount worth 35 billion USD assets under management (AUM).

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