Secure off-chain community voting

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Privacy, integrity, verifiability, receipt-freeness, dispute resolution – these are only some of the properties that can be simultaneously achieved using state-of-the art voting mechanisms. And this is why they are desirable and in many ways superior even to paper-based voting systems:

• privacy: no attaining information about anyone else's vote
• integrity: correctness of the election outcome
• verifiability: any participant being able to verify that his/her vote has been correctly taken into account and that the overall recorded votes are tallied correctly
• receipt-freeness: it is not possible for a voter to afterwards prove to an adversary how he/she voted – this is an important feature to protect against corruption
• dispute resolution: when a voter detects manipulation he can convince others that the election operator is dishonest, while the operator cannot be falsely convicted

Such systems can be implemented even off-chain without sacrificing decentralization. The advantage of off-chain solutions is that they are fee-less and hence elections can be made more available and conducted at a higher frequency which is essential for the well-function of democratized DAO-like structures.

Our team intends to bridge the gap between theoretical results and corresponding implementations specifically tailored to the Cardano ecosystem (i.e. participation via Cardano wallet). All resulting tools will be made open-source. We believe such infrastructure is essential for a thriving community-governed ecosystem venturing into a new era of true democracy and decentralization.

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

DAOs are inherently based on the ability to conduct digital elections. And the well-functioning of a DAO crucially depends on the quality of the underlying voting solution. With this project we're aiming to bring the best properties of voting mechanisms known to cryptographers (and in many cases these properties are best-possible) to the Cardano ecosystem. Every project having open-source access to high quality election implementations will give a massive boost to community governance of many projects in the ecosystem. Cardano <3 DAOs and DAOs <3 secure elections.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

As we already have an overview of state-of-the-art voting protocols, and a lot of experience with writing software that integrates well into the Cardano ecosystem, we don’t see any risk that the project can’t be delivered successfully. Also, we will not encounter any budget problems as any extra costs will be covered by the MuesliSwap team. Since developing DAO-like community governance is also part of the MuesliSwap roadmap, the team has a high interest in developing quality solutions. As we have a big development team, we will also not encounter risks like development staff leaving.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

The detailed budget breakdown also presents the different milestones into which the project will be divided. Throughout the entire project we are planning to deliver tech updates informing the community of our development process.

Timeline:

Research: (1 months)

Our research will be concluded by reviewing existing works in the field. We will then evaluate suitability of different methods for the specific use-case as a Cardano community voting solution and publish a paper outlining our results. This will hopefully spark further discussion in the community which we can integrate into the subsequent development stage.

Development: (2-3 months)

The development process of implementing the results of the research stage will be documented through open source repositories. This makes implementations fully transparent and progress immediately observable.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Total: 51,750 USD

As the requested amount will not be sufficient to cover the full costs of research, development, the MuesliSwap team is planning on covering the remaining costs to create the open-source off-chain voting infrastructure.

Research: 150 hours - 11,250 USD 

Development: 540 hours - 40,500 USD

Research: 

• Reviewing state-of-the-art research papers and surveys on election mechanisms - 20 hours
• Writing prototypes for most promising solutions - 70 hours
• Testing and evaluating suitability for application in Cardano community votings - 30 hours
• Collecting results and publishing survey paper - 20 hours
• Discussion with community and incorporation of results - 10 hours

Development:

• Off-Chain back-end voting system code - 300 hours
• Integration of cryptographic libraries - 5 hours
• Core implementation of secure tallying system - 120 hours
• API interface for interaction with core voting system - 30 hours
• System testing - 50 hours
• Security analysis - 50 hours
• Peer-review of code - 40 hours
• Documentation for off-chain Code - 5 hours
• Code for user interface for election participation - 200 hours
• UX design and modeling phase - 25 hours
• Implementation of back-end API interaction - 50 hours
• Front-end implementation - 80 hours
• Cardano wallet integration with all major wallets - 20 hours
• Testing of code and interaction with off-chain back-end components - 20 hours
• Creating documentation and user instructions - 5 hours
• Execution of several mock community elections for collection user feedback - 40 hours
• Instantiation of election system for project-specific community - 5 hours
• Setup of user feedback system - 5 hours
• Election execution - 5 hours
• Evaluation of user feedback - 5 hours
• Incorporating user feedback - 20 hours

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

The MuesliSwap development team together with external help will work on this project. The MuesliSwap development team currently consists of 9 developers with experience in different fields from which most are long-standing Cardano community members. With Muesliswap being the first major DAapp launching in November 2021 the team has gained a lot of experience in developing Plutus smart contracts and the corresponding off-chain code. As part of the Dapp development process, the MuesliSwap Team gained significant experience in developing decentralized finance infrastructure and Plutus smart contracts. Currently, we are operating multiple different smart contracts on Cardano mainnet (liquidity pools, order book DEX, staking contracts etc.).

Having a very active community that is always eager to participate in governing the future development of our platform, we are very aware of the need for effective and Cardano-tailored community voting infrastructure.

Further, several team members have experience in the theoretical foundations of cryptography as well as the usage of cryptographic libraries in order to turn abstract mechanisms into secure and reliable software.

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

We are not planning to return for further funding in a later round for that specific project. The remaining cost of development is planned to be covered by the MuesliSwap team.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

We are trying to be very transparent throughout the entire research and development process. As part of the research process we are planning to write a survey paper. Development will be publicly observable via GitHub.

Survey paper

Once the research phase has been finished, we will publish our findings in a survey paper, detailing the possible mechanism designs. We will evaluate their suitability for implementation as a Cardano community voting system and explain the resulting up- and downsides of each potential solution. We are confident that any further input coming from the many active and experienced Cardano community members can then be taken into account when deciding for one specific solution and planning the remaining implementation details.

Open Source Development

Once the development phase starts, we will be able to open source the repositories on GitHub so that the progress can be publicly tracked by the community.

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

The Cardano Voltaire era is all about turning the Cardano blockchain into a self-sustaining system at a global scale. With our development of an off-chain voting solution, we hope to greatly contribute to effective and secure governance at a project-internal scale. We consider this project a success if not only MuesliSwap itself can benefit from our developed community voting solution (which it definitely will!) but also many other projects can reuse our open-source code or even extend it further.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

This is a new proposal made by the MuesliSwap team.