On-chain governance was designed primarily to democratize power, although its transparency actually opens up one significant problem. Since votes are visible to everyone before the end result is recorded, that allows the participants to try and influence each other. Big token holders are likely to move to rebalance; smaller voters have the option to hop in line alongside the majority, and the outcome is a coordinated decision when compared to a result that is guided by true individual-based preferences.
Most voting systems, in addition, have the dependency on someone conducting the process behind the scenes. An operator essentially takes care of the infrastructure, works in handling the voting data, and provides the final results. Individuals, however, need to trust that this operator is going to behave with integrity and will not disrupt the normal working of the process.
Interfold is designed to eliminate that dependency simply by establishing a voting system that ensures that private inputs are sufficient in terms of helping deliver a public and verifiable outcome and all of that without having the dependency on any central party.
How Interfold eliminates the trustworthy operator
But it additionally comes with Interfold’s software, and it can help enable votes to be registered, encrypted, and computed spanning across a network of machines rather than that of a single server. A single individual cannot view all of the votes, supervise the counting procedure, or even dictate when the results should be out.
It’s only revealed as soon as a threshold number of independent individuals participating in the network have reached a consensus on a solution. And anyone is able to verify the result, no matter that we don’t know who cast the private votes. The idea is to set up a voting system in which no single person is in charge of carrying out the process, but the released result can be verified by each and every participant, which means high transparency.
The need of receipt-freshness for private voting
Interfold also makes the use of a concept that is termed as receipt-freshness. This is utilized to prohibit voters from proving how they made the vote.
The importance of that comes into existence when a vote can be proven; then a voter could theoretically be pressured or mandated to vote a certain way. The absence of this proof of what vote was cast allows for the buying and selling of votes or other kinds of voter intimidation on the difficult side. As viewed from a governance perspective, this stance ensures a new, higher level of privacy and makes it possible for people to take part without any fear of their vote being directly linked or identifiable back to them.
Beyond voting: setting up confidential coordination mechanisms
Interfold defines the process as “confidential coordination.” This rule is applicable to systems that go beyond just private voting, in which one can have several inputs originating from individuals that voluntarily contribute their information privately while ensuring the outcome is transparent to all the participants that were involved in the voting process.
Secret voting is the first example of this process, although the same technology used might potentially assist with additional use cases and this includes sealed-bid auctions as well as different types of coordination mechanisms in which privacy and trust carry the same level of importance.
Aragon partnership brings Interfold a step closer to true governance
The partnership with Aragon provides Interfold a unique opportunity to evaluate its technology in a real governance setting. Aragon has already been building standard tools for on-chain governance starting with the early DAO ecosystem and that is what makes it a natural platform to look into emerging voting models.
The Aragon Foundation is in support of the Interfold’s development. This is through a grant, in which developers are able to evaluate the integration and individuals are able to look into the functioning application. This is what makes the partnership much more significant than just a theoretical announcement. The technology is currently readily accessible for testing purposes.
Why Vitalik Buterin’s support matters
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently highlighted Interfold as an example of anti-collusion infrastructure and private voting technology.
Anti-collusion systems are designed to reduce the ability of participants to coordinate unfairly outside the rules of a mechanism. In governance, such technology is important because visible votes can create pressure before a decision is finalized.
If voters cannot prove their choices and no operator controls the process, common attack points become harder to exploit.
