Voting is a critical component in the decision-making process of DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations), where web3 voting mechanisms strive for transparency and verifiability. Despite these goals, these mechanisms often face issues like voter apathy, manipulation, and a lack of privacy. These challenges can lead to unrepresentative outcomes and weaken the integrity of governance systems. Common problems in web3 voting include voters being influenced by early trends in the voting process or malicious actors manipulating the vote outcome by acquiring tokens at the last minute, leaving no time for community response.

Shielded Voting is a solution that addresses these issues through threshold encryption. Its method is straightforward yet effective: during the voting period, only the total amount of voting power used is displayed. Once the voting concludes, all votes, including individual voting choices, are revealed. This system offers several benefits, such as ensuring pre-voting information symmetry, enhancing confidentiality and fairness, resisting censorship, and protecting against manipulation by large token holders. It also improves the overall user experience.

Currently, Shielded Voting on Snapshot is the favored voting setup, used by 382 unique communities. It has safeguarded over 2,330 proposals and 216,805 cast votes. Shutter Network offers Shielded Voting to all communities on Snapshot completely free of charge, and we hope to offer Shielded Voting to communities on other voting platforms in the near future.

Learn more and discuss Shielded Voting by Shutter Network on discuss.octant.app.