How to Run an Election without the State with Vocdoni
I spoke to Ferran Reyes and Pau Escrich, co-founders of Vocdoni, a blockchain based voting protocol used by several non-web3 organizations. They were born out of the Catalan independence movement in Spain from which they have designed Vocdoni to be censorship resistant and friendly to your average non-web3 user.
During the episode we discussed some of the elections where Vocdoni was used, the cryptographic primitives that make it all possible and the learnings they have had in their journey so far. We also discussed DAVINCI, their latest evolution of the Vocdoni voting protocol.
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Transcript
Police was everywhere. They were opening new judicial cases against anyone. And people was meeting in this secret without mobile phones and so on. And we were accused of terrorism. And that's that's a bit that's crazy because, I mean, how can you do terrorism by writing code? But, like, it's really important that we have, like, autonomous
spaces now. And also, like, that we can take advantage now that we are still, like, kind of, like, in peace to have this technology evolving. Because I think, like, a good voting system, for example, is, like, a good privacy. No? Like, seems like no one cares about privacy until you have to care. Yeah. It's like a choice of who do you want to be disappointed by.
Yeah. A corporation is just basically a dictatorship. I mean, it is the dictatorship of of the the shareholders. In digital vaulting, bribery and coercion
can can happen at large
scale. I'm I'm really scared about the last things that are happening in Europe, US, and so, like, this week also, the, decision of Apple to accept the UK government, like, request on adding a backdoor on, for example, end to end encryption of iCloud.
Well, hello, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast. I am Josh, and I am here with Ferran Reyes and Pau Escriq, who are the cofounders. In case you don't know, is a really interesting protocol that has facilitated, voting, basically, without the state. That's kind of, I think, the the, like, one sentence summary I can put out there is how I understand it. But it's a project I've been following for a while. It's been pretty interesting just because it exists in a real context of kind of, pushing back against the states, specifically in Catalonia. So, yeah, I'm excited to get into this. I think maybe just to start off, if you guys want to introduce yourselves, Ferran and Pau, and then we can we can go from there and talk about, talk about Evocdoni.
Hi, Josh. Yeah. Thank you for inviting us, today. I'm Ferrant Reyes, and I'm I'm cofounder of Evocdoni and also, like, working on the communication side. And, yeah, we have been, like, for six years, working on on Fogdoni and to make this, voting protocol that we can explain more now. Hey, Josh.
Thank you for having us here today. Yes. My name is Pao, and I've been working in Fogdoni for the last six, seven years already. I started it back in 2018. I've been working in distributed systems. I am a computer engineer, for the last almost fifteen, almost twenty years. I discovered blockchain back in 2011, and it blocked my mind. And from that moment, I I just wanted to try to find interesting use cases for for these amazing technology. So yeah.
Yeah. Nice. I think definitely one of the one of those use cases is that I have always been, you know, fascinated with and I think, like, deserves a whole lot more attention, you know, beyond the kind of financial speculative sides of the cryptocurrency space or the folk that I think is just kinda, like, overfocus on money and overfocus on, like, coin price going up. Like, some a space where I think there is kind of fairly, you know, objective kind of, space for, like, interesting experimentation and good, but doesn't get as much maybe attention and funding is voting. So maybe if you guys want to explain, like, maybe let's start high level, kinda what Vokdani is and how it differentiates itself from from kind of traditional voting systems. And then let's get into, like, the the the story behind Bogdani. You've explained it to me before we started recording a little bit more in in detail, but it's a fascinating story, and it's, like, rooted in an actual kind of political movement in in Catalonia. So maybe we can start like that.
So, basically, Baldoni, as you were saying, like, it gets running in in Catalonia, after the the Catalan, referendum, experience. Like, as you may know, in Catalonia, we have a really big community of, people interested in the centralized technologies. Like, we have been, like, pioneers in open source software, also in the Linux ecosystem. We have really good cryptographers, and also the UPC University, for example. We had also, like, as you know, a culture, a heritage of anarchism, cooperativism, and and many, like, alternative ways of living, let's say, and making economy different. So we have been building or we are attracted by these technologies that that allow a different wall to be built. So, after Catalan referendum twenty seventeen, we had many people, like, meeting in, like, in meet tabs, you know, and and all the other spaces from the from the y three ecosystem. And we were thinking, wow. So we built, an alternative financial system so that people can participate, can, let's say, vote with their money. But that like, that's not how humanity works. Like like, the financial side of humans are or the economical economic side of humans is one side, but we have many other ways that we can participate in society. You know? And that's when, we started thinking we just had this referendum that was, like, stopped by repression by the Spanish state. Why we can't have the same that Bitcoin build now that Ethereum is also building, but for, other types of governance, not like voting. So we can have, voting with the same attributes as, like, a crypt or, like, let's say, it's censorship resistant. It's, verifiable, so anyone what's going on there. It we were we're also, like, starting to have some anonymity, like, primitives that are being built. That's also an important attribute for voting. It's permissionless. No. Like and we were starting to, like, build, like, pow, with other, like, people that were enthusiast and they were techies. I'm not. They started to design, like, an an a new protocol for voting based on Web three, but always having in mind that this should serve, society. So even if we're building with Web three technology, we always had people in mind. Like, not people, but, I mean, like, the people that is already having, like, cooperatives, associations, little towns, like, that they can do a referendum, queen, not like having this as a target. Mhmm. And, yeah, that's
how we started. Yeah. I I would like to correct one thing that you said for Varane, is that the referendum in Catalonia, it was not blocked. There were 2,000,000, I think more than 2,000,000 people that voted with all the police trying to avoid it And all the, you know, the the the cipher and civil institutions in Spain, trying to also, block it through the Internet. So it it went well. But, you know, it was a very good opportunity for us, for the people who were around that context, to understand what are the tools that a state in the first world have to try to block this kind of, popular, initiative. So, we learn a lot at that point, what they do, what they cannot do. And I would say that was the seat to start thinking about how using current blockchain technology, can we build something that is actually censorship resistant? Not only in the paper, but in the reality.
Right. Yeah. I think what is, like, really fascinating so I mean, just to, you know, just to shield myself a little bit, back in 2021, I wanna say, or '22, I I wrote a a blog post called, anarcho syndicalism and DAOs, where I use the history of Catalonia in the Spanish Civil War and their history with, with anarchism and anarcho syndicalism as being this really interesting historical model or, like, framework or just inspiration for what kind of the ideal of DAOs should be. So anarchist anarcho syndicalism kind of, like, very quickly for people in case they don't know, is just this idea, kind of political movement of, workers taking over industry, taking over businesses, and running it themselves as, like, kinda giant cooperatives, and they govern themselves via, via that position of of, you know, owning the means of production through, through cooperativism. And, I think what is very fascinating is that Catalonia, because it already had it already exists in this context of kind of being, in in in itself fairly, like, economically powerful in relation to the rest of Spain to some degree. It allows itself some amount of autonomy, and it has its own history and language, in the face of kind of Spanish fascism, which existed for some, like, thirty to fifty years. I can't remember exactly how long Franco's, regime was, but, you know, a kind of, like, yeah, a kind of horrific end to the Spanish civil war, while, you know, Catalonia and Catalans were kind of oppressed for for a long time. And then we had the the transition to to democracy, for Spain, which was, you know, for plenty of people, if you look into it, it's not that much of a transition. It's largely, you know, paint over, kind of the existing institutions of its time and the same people were in power over it. But I think given this context, it somehow breed it a wonderful kind of, space of innovation when it comes to taking seriously democracy and, democracy that is resistant to repression from the state and trying to find alternatives to specifically the state whenever in this context, the Spanish state was kind of like the main oppressor, for Catalonia. So maybe I think it would be, interesting if you wanna go into some of the some of the obstacles in the story that you that you guys have, in, like, in creating Book Dani. You've had, you know, the Spanish government has gone after you guys in in various ways, but, if you guys want to to tell that story.
Yeah. Sure. So and back in 2018, after the referendum in Catalonia, there was, hunting for a political hunting against independent activists in Catalonia. So, you know, police was everywhere. They were opening new judicial cases against anyone. And people was meeting in this secret, you know, secret meeting without mobile phones and so on. So, when we started Bogdoni, we knew that that would probably not, not what it it's gonna be something that is not gonna like to the to the to the current establishment of of the Spanish government. So, we also it was a difficult start, you know, because even we were not doing anything illegal, we feel like we were doing something illegal. And, of course, we were only building open source technology. And and our purpose was to build something that can be used by anyone to express an opinion. But, yeah, that moment was hard. Finding, funds was also hard because people was scared in general. They didn't want to support projects activist projects like this at that moment because, they could be persecuted. And so, yeah, we we had some hard time at that moment. But we went through. And we achieved what we called a seed round that was more like crowdfunding from people around Catalonia that helped us to actually start to build something in a more professional way. That was in 2019. And then we built this, this bolting protocol, which is, a layer one blockchain based on, technology called Tendermint. Mhmm. And we started using it in real use cases. Because at that time, in Catalonia, there were many, organizations, that wanted wanted to to vote. I mean, voting was, like, a very important primitive in in the Catalan society because we came from the referendum experience and everyone was like, we want to vote about everything. So that was the also a very good context for Bogdoni Mhmm. To to test as a playground, to test what we were building. So we had this first voting, for instance, with, 30,000 people. And then we had more and more and more and more. And that got very interesting because it allow us to gather all the information about what the standard citizen actually needs in order to be able to participate on this on this complex systems. Because at the end, Web three and Blockchain are very complex systems. So our motto was always make something which is Web three in the back end, but Web two in the front end. And I know this is now, also the forecaster motto, but we were using it, already in 02/1918. So we put a lot of efforts on building this very simplified UI with a Ethereum wallet hidden behind the the front end, completely very easy to use experience on vaulting and so on. And then, at some point, we were, out of money again, of course, because we raised 200 keys in 2019, and that was good. But if you will need to pay salaries, we were growing as a team. We were already, like, 10 developers. So we needed more monies, and then we started a kind of funding round. Mhmm. And that was hard because, voting is it's conceived in the outside of Catalonia. I mean, if you go to other countries to to find money for voting, They see it as a very interesting thing, but something in the long term. So it's an investment for the next ten years, let's say. Mhmm. And most of the VCs and the investors are looking for investments at short term, like one to three years, maybe.
How am I supposed to get my 100 x, you know, in in Yeah. Yeah. That that In a year on voting. Yeah.
Yeah. So that was hard. But we finally found, funding. It was more an acquihire. We were acquihired by by by Aragon, Aragon, the the DAO framework, because at that point, they needed something for off chain bolting Mhmm. Because bolting on chain was very expensive. And we had this solution, which was off chain. Let's not it's not off chain. I mean, we had our own blockchain, so it's a kind of on chain vaulting. But you don't need to pay for gas because it's our blockchain, so we decide, how expensive are the transactions and so on. And then they acquihire the whole team and the project, and Bogdoni then was a side project of Aragon. But then Aragon in in in 2023 disappeared, so now we are back in our own.
Right. And the obstacles I would just to maybe to get through through this, like, we're not just not just a difficulty of finding funding for something that is, like, for everyone, obviously a very important thing, but not an obvious kind of, like, return on investment by by VCs, of course. I think the kind of other types of, things I don't know if you want to talk about, but, like, there were there were obstacles imposed by, by the government, imposed by, people with with significant state power, who also were pushing back against Doug. I don't know if you wanna talk about that a bit.
Yeah. Yeah. Of course. So, yeah, we we were targeted with, tools like Pegasus.
Pegasus is like the Israeli software, like, spyware kinda system that, like, knows everything that you're doing, basically. Yeah.
Yeah. And we were accused of terrorism. And that's Yeah. That's I mean, that's crazy because, I mean, how can you do terrorism by writing code? I don't understand. But, yeah, we were I mean, if if if, they accuse you of terrorism, then they have a lot of freedom on what kind of, things can tools can use for go against you. So that was what they used in order to be able to use Plasus and Candiru, which is another spyware also. And, of course, all the phones were, were how do you call it? Were Infected? No. It's infected. I mean, all the lines, the standard lines, the voice the voice like, tabs were
Recorded. Yeah. Tapped. Yeah. Yeah.
Even my parents Yeah. And some of my friends that had nothing to do with, or or technology in general. And I think at that time, they were very scared of something like Bogdoni because the referendum had been something very dangerous for them. I mean, I think we the Catalan people was very close to actually achieve a real independence at that moment. And and and so they were, like, shooting everywhere. And Right. Of course, we were one of the targets. And I saw all the new papers, not all of them, but most of the establishment new papers, and televisions were also talking about with lies, like, accusing us of being related with. We are not, of course. And many other things, like, of course, all the story with Russia, Putin, and everything that is considered, like Right. Bad guys in the world, we were somehow Right. Right. Attach it to them.
Yeah. You were somehow, at the same time, extreme right and extreme left, and everyone across the political spectrum has some reason to, like, hate you and be afraid of you or something. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. No. This is They are very very very
nice pieces of that of, I mean, newspaper pieces of that moment. For instance, they were making the relation, if, Ethereum, we are using somehow Ethereum. So we are related to Ethereum. Ethereum founder is Vitalik. Vitalik is Russian. From Russian. And so he's friend of Putin, of course. So we are also friends of Putin. Crystal. This kind of relation, you know, like, what Right. Right. I have nothing to say.
Sorry. You're canceled.
But Yeah. But this is, I I think, like, a good, showcase, no. As I was saying before of what what is do when they feel, like, trigger nor or or menace. Threatened. Yeah. Like like, we have all this literature, like, you know, like, Hannah Arendt or or thinkers like that that after the, like, the Nazism and all these, like, repressive systems, like, fall. No. Like, that they were, like, literally saying, like, centralized systems can lead to that. Like, Mhmm. It can lead to control, can lead to repression, can suppression of this event, you know, like, all these things. And, I think because of, like, the kind of, like, a piece that we lived in the north end of history that we lived in the last, like, thirty years. Kinda like we forgot about that, but, like, it's really important that we have, like, autonomous spaces. No? And, also, like, that we can have or take advantage now that we are still, like, kind of, like, in peace to have this technology evolving. And because because I think and, like, a good voting system, for example, is, like, a good privacy. No? Like, seems like no one cares about privacy until you have to care. No? But, like, you need it. It's like a like a like, even like a human right. No? Like, it should be like a like a human right in that sense. And and, yeah, and I think what happened in Catalonia was a good showcase of what can happen in, like, what we call, like, western democracies in that sense, and how important projects like Bogdoni or have being able to obfuscate, transactions or things like that. No. Or or or having some identity that, has, some privacy layer on front so we can have, we can't avoid political profiling or master like, we saw what Cambridge Analytica were doing with Facebook. Like, what can happen? Like Yeah. Like, as a voting system is, like, controlled by a state or by a central authority like a company, if they start doing mass psychological profiling in that sense. No? Even not you don't need, like, strong impression. Even that is already, like, like, reason enough to have these systems.
Right. Yeah. With enough, with enough data and enough compute, you don't really need to repress. You can just, nudge behavioral nudging for sure. Yeah. No. Yeah. So I think I think it's just, like, interesting for the audience to kind of understand the the the political context which this is coming from and the kind of yeah. The you know? Because 90% of the crypto projects out there oftentimes come from just simply a a guy who's trying to make some money. This is coming from a much a much different context, and a collective one and one that's rooted in a historical, political movement. But I think maybe we can move on. I would love to hear some specific examples of any kind of elections that have successfully used the Vognodi protocol and what impact did they have on their respective communities.
Sure. I can go ahead with that. Yeah. We have like, our motto is that, the voting protocol has to be, like, by default by default, like, good for everyone. So we are trying to make secure voting accessible to the masses. That's the most important thing because we also saw that when you, like, make things, like, for opt in, like, there may be reasons why people will just choose a weaker system. No? And I think if we can, have a system that by default has, like, really good attributes, like, what we're saying, like, censorship resistance, universal verifiability, and so on, it's good for everyone to have it. And, of course, there are project that will need more this type of systems. Now, like, for example, we had the the Belarusian, political opposition. Like, I I guess many people is familiar with the the regime that it is in in in Belarus with the present president ruling already for thirty years and how, like, there is little chance for alternative, politics there. And then the the position political position there, we're building an arbic they are building, an alternative government, let's say, like, some kind of, like, what happens, for example, in in the the Spanish state, during the Franco repression, know that we had a government in exile or also the Irish, this type of situation. And they have this council, that is this alternative kind of, like, government, and they needed elections for that. And they organized it with because they considered that for two main reasons. One was it was the universally the universal variability that allows, to verify that all the process is being, like, done properly, and it has not been, like, intervene or tampered. And, also, because it was censorship resistant, oh, as you're doing a election there. So they built, this app called the new Belarus identity system and so on. Around 7,000 people from Belarus, voted in, to choose the the the Citizens Council for this organization. That was, I think, like, one of the the highest stake of votes we did. We also had, last year, I think you were we were talking about this before, a vote with Escarpublicana that is one of the biggest, political parties in in Spain in in number of, of membership. And they held this election no. Well, that was not election. It was an internal voting in which members had to decide if they support or not, Salvatoria that was the the, candidate to become president of Catalonia from the Socialist Party that they are, they are not independentists, but the is. So it was an important decision for them. And it was crucial because the this will not only, like, sustain the stability or not of Catalan government, but also from the Spanish government because all these relations of support I support you here, then you support me there. Blah blah blah. Right. So this was also a vote, in which, those those the dozens of, thousands of of people were, like, involved. And that was also a really high stake, because there were a lot of interest for this not to happen in one direction and the other. So it was prone to attacks and so. And then we had also, like, global voting, like, Football Club Barcelona, for example. They use us to to for their That's super cool. Yeah. For the board elections. As you may know, is a is an association. It's not a company. Yeah. So they had this and they have members all around the world. You know? So they needed this system that allow for voting around the globe. And then we also had, for example, Omnium Cultural, that is the biggest cultural association in Europe, but they are, like, promoting Catalan culture, and they were also, like, promoting Catalan self out to the termination, interest. So they had they have also, like, hundreds of thousands of members, and they have been also always targeted by Spanish estate. So that was also highest state voting. Mhmm. And then just to, like, to finish, we have had also some, referendums and, like, votes in, towns in Spain, that are, under the the the law of of, citizens, participation, like, consultancy and so. And they were also, like, following the the requirements for a for a vote that can be, like, trusted and so. We are also organized that for some for some times.
Nice. That was a lot of examples. See, like, when I when I listen, I I hear, like, very many different contexts, in which kind of it is important to have this kind of input from a lot of people to know to provide, like, legitimacy for what people wants to happen in some sort of collective. I think what's you know, one of the things that I think is, like like, kind of like the purpose of voting in this democratic way is to provide legitimacy for actions. And, of course, there are ways you can you can do this, which is kinda bullshit. But the point is to make systems in which it's not bullshit and, you know, you have high trust that people are actually providing, what are the things that they desire, what are the things that they want to happen, and they've been able to express that. And, there are many different contexts in which that can happen and there, I think, for a lot of people, I think it's just so not normal to vote that they kind of feel like, what is the point of voting? I do it once every four or five years, and, like, my vote is basically thrown away because the party that I that I wanted to elect, for example, doesn't go into power. Or if they do go into power, they're not putting in the policies that I actually want. They completely changed their their platform. But I think there is something very powerful in trying to make democracy normal in the same way that, like, you know, I love like, people talk about, like, privacy is normal. I think democracy is normal. Like, that that should be the norm in which people engage in democracy in kind of, like, their their everyday lives, and and this is one way that that this, I think, kind of happens. And I think is an important political tool to, to to to force, you know, the hand of those in power so that there is, like, a public acknowledgment. I think there's a difference, you know, whenever, for example, like, if people if you had a legitimate kind of voting process that expressed that people did not like, you know, x policy that is ongoing part of the government in which, like, you know, it seems very popular because the government keeps talking about it and, like, the news keeps talking about it. But then if you ask everyone individually, they're like, no. I fucking hate this. I don't want this. I don't want to be, like, going to war or whatever the fuck it is. That's, like, I in in my view at least, like, a very powerful thing and and something that I think, having therefore non state kinda directed and resilient technical systems for voting is super important. And you gave, like, 10 different examples for where for where that could happen.
And and let me add here, that I do believe that, we currently do not have, real democracies. We have Yeah. Representative governments. So as you said, we vote one every four or five years to choose our representatives, and then they do whatever they want to do. Right.
To me, democracy is something different. Yeah. It's like a choice of who do you want to be disappointed by.
Yeah. Exactly. And, and I think, in small groups, real democracy is possible. But it doesn't scale to big groups of people. And the only way to make it scalable is through technology. And I do believe right now we have the tools in our hands, thanks to blockchains, thanks to zk SNARKs, Firium, and so on, to be able to create real democracies using, the new technology. So to me, that was also one of the main motivations of for for working on McDonough. You know, like now it's the moment. Now we have all the pieces that we need in order to build this technology that would allow democracy at a big scale. I think it is. So, but, Donnie, we we
not only support come back. Yeah. Like, I can add something to what I was saying, like, just as an example. We support any kind of With Vocdoni, we are trying to do, like, secure voting, like, accessible to everyone. Also, like, because we are using, economies of a scale. As we are using a blockchain, you don't need to deploy a system every time you need the voting. No. Like, everyone can like, just like in Ethereum. If you want to do transactions, you do it. There is no you don't have to ask permission. Like, the system is there is working twenty four seven and so. So, making it accessible and affordable may means that, for example, in Catalonia, No. Like, we have this cooperative, that is, Somenergia that is, the biggest, energy, cooperative in in Spain. No? When people vote in this cooperative, is there difference if they do it with Google Forms or a data do they know or if they do it with a with a proper voting system? This means they are doing some signaling to society. You know? Like, they have dozens of, thousands of members. And when they vote something, like, for example, if they disagree with a law that is being passed by the parliament, to say something, this means that they are doing a signaling. Like, all these thousands of people are, like, sending a message to the government. Like, they're being a counterforce. And we believe that a protocol like like, the ones that we're building at Fontoni can allow for this recurrent participation or recurrent voting, recurrent signaling. And that's because sometimes people, when they think about voting, they think about something that is boring and something that, as you were saying, you know, like, happens every four or five, years. Yeah. But that's a really, like, a really limiting, way of seeing, voting, or signaling. Like, there are there are
Right. I in in part, I think it's it's because we've like, with this corporate domination of most of the economy and most places, in the world, like, you a a corporation, you know, I'm is just basically a dictatorship. I mean, it is the dictatorship of of the of the shareholders. And therefore, if that's the kind of economic structure that you are engaging with 99% of the time in which there is no there is no pretense that you will get any say in anything that happens in this, you know, productive asset, then you're not going to expect that in other places either because it's like, you know, that is, like, what you engage with most of the time. So yeah. And I think there's there's a we need to, you know you know, I think that, you know, the structure of society is kind of what, like, helps understanding the structure of society helps us understand and, like, think about what are, like, norms in the world. And to create new norms by having different types of organizational structures, different types of expectations, and just, like, providing the option at the very least to vote in things as, like, a normal thing, I think would kind of break people's, like, thinking around what institutions are and what to expect from them. But I did want to get into maybe you can go a little bit into how exactly Vakhtani ensures censorship resistance, especially in these types of places where, you know, political suppression is, like, expected, perhaps. What are the kinds of techniques that that Vakhtani, implements in order to ensure this type of resistance?
So, on the protocol that we built in 2018, as I said, it was a layer one blockchain. So censorship resistant is, achieved because we have nodes of the blockchain so this is a what is called a Byzantine Fault Tolerant blockchain meaning that you need two thirds of the network in order to make it work, but one third can can fail. So the more nodes you have, the more censorship resistant it is. To be honest, this has been, I would say, the main issue of, Bogdoni for the last years because we were not, providing any, reward incentive in order to have nodes. So we had nodes in, let's say, friendly institutions like universities or foundations and so on. They wanted to contribute to the network, so they had one of these nodes running and so on. But, you know, it doesn't scale to big numbers enough in order to to actually ensure censorship resistant. But now, we are building a new a new protocol, which is called DaVinci. Yeah. It it states for, stands for, let me find it. It stands for the centralized autonomous vaulting infrastructure with cryptographic integrity.
And Awesome.
Yes. It's a new name. So I think it's
Was that planned or was, after you made it, you realized DaVinci?
It's a mix of both. Yeah. Now what what we want to achieve with this new protocol is to remove all this layer of, blockchain nodes because nowadays we have this new technology, which is c k s narks. Mhmm. It It already existed in 2018, but it was in a very early stage. So it was very hard to use it. But nowadays, you have even virtual machines that can execute any program in a z k environment. So, we're building this new protocol that it will be like a layer two for Ethereum. So you don't need coordination between nodes and and consensus. You just need to trust in the in cryptography because as you can see, SNR can prove that a computation is correct. So the participants of this layer two can just compute and process a number of votes in a single cryptographic proof and then send it to Ethereum and the smart contract will validate that proof, and if correct it will be added to the rest of the proofs. And so there can be many actors, the centralized actors, anyone can be one of these, relayers or sequencers, taking the votes, creating this z k aggregating them in a z k snark proof and then uploading them to to Ethereum. And that and that for this system we are adding, economic incentive through a new token that will probably come at the end of the year or something like that. We still don't know. But this is a utility token which is required in order to reward this network of layer two sequencers that will have will be processing the votes and creating the cryptographic proofs. So this is how we want to finally fix the censorship resistant issue. You are never 100% censorship resistant. So you can be the more censorship resistance you can, but it's there is always something that can block you. But we expect that with this new approach, this new architecture, we will have a much higher level of censorship resistant.
So then yeah. I think the the thing with distributed systems is that either it's like there there are never a 100% guarantees in almost anything. You always have to kind of, yeah, like, you you can you can have, like, a 99% guarantee or you can have, like, very, very low chance of, you know, some issue occurring, but you can never have a 100% because, like, anything could technically happen in the world. And so the, I think it's interesting you guys had basically an alt l one, I assume, using maybe, like, a consensus mechanism, like proof of authority or or something like this, as a default tolerance. Right? Which is interesting. I mean, it's, yeah. One of the things that I've, like, always wondered about or, like, thought of if, like, imagine imagine if I was, like, you know, if I was actually a government and I wanted to create kind of a technical infrastructure in which I allowed, like, citizens to kind of, like, own a part of the infrastructure of the government in a way by kind of encouraging, you know, citizens to run their own nodes for, facilitating, you know, votes that happen within within the government or or something like that. I think would be really, really fascinating. And, of course, like, one of those, there there are many different types of implementations you can do that. The proof of authority, of course, is, like, it's a non financialized one, but then you come with the the issue over time similar to, like, Tor, like, these types of, decentralized systems where maybe some people will do it because they they believe in the in the thing itself. But, there are less guarantees than if you were to provide some sort of economic incentive, which is, you know, in part why blockchains have become so successful and as far as providing security because people can can make money off of it. And so providing, like, a a little bit of, financial reward for people to do it does increase the the the censorship resistance in in the case of, like, you know, your partners are all of a sudden, like, yeah. I don't really wanna run the node anymore.
Yeah. That's that's also me at some
Yeah. That's also important when when adding this, incentive economical incentive layer. It's also that, nowadays, the world is ruled by state nations, you know, that have, like, their their laws, and they use the monopolies monopoly force, you know, but they we are still have, like, like, kind of, like, sovereignty. You know? Like, every state nation has has their own enforcement also allowing for, to people to run their own sequencers or nodes and off network. It allows someone maybe to run a node in a country that is not, friendly maybe with another with a good another country. No. And that makes a lot of they this brings a lot of resilience to a distributed system because I think different having notes in different legislations, popping up now, I think that's that's really important.
Yeah. I I wanted also to say something. Is that, in I mean, why, in our layer one proof of authority solution, we never release a token is because, we consider that voting is, cannot be cannot depend on on money.
Right.
And and that's an issue because, in in consensus systems, the correctness of the of the logic of the blockchain depends on the consensus. So if two thirds of the nodes of the network decided to change the rules of the system, they can do that. So if you have money you have a proof of stake system and you use it for voting, and you have enough money, you can buy enough stake or or computation power. It doesn't matter if it's proof of proof of work in order to modify the logic of the blockchain and create new rules for voting. So this is why we never wanted to have a token, on that network. We wanted to have it proof of authority so we can choose trusted partners. They put their name, their their reputation, and so on. But now with the new protocol with DaVinci, it changes because we are fully trusting in cryptography. So there is no consensus requirement there. So no one can change the rules. I mean, the smart contract that will verify the ZKG SNARK proofs, it's cannot be changed. It's unmutable, and it also will, it also have all the security from the Ethereum Mainnet network. So, even if we have a token in order to incentivize the the sequencers, If someone buys the token and try to perform some kind of attack, they cannot, affect the actual voting. So So this is why in this news context, we we accept to release a token. What but and and and why not in the past?
Yeah. Yeah. I think now we've come to a point the technology has progressed to where we can, you know, the the you have the option now to borrow essentially the security of Ethereum. Right? You have you where you no longer necessarily you don't have to make the decision between, do I make my own financialized kind of infrastructure, or do I have a completely nonfinancialized infrastructure? You get you can find this place in the middle now where you can borrow the already existing security provisions of Ethereum, in one way or another. They're, like, probably five, at least different ways off the top of my head. You can you can do this. And then you can, provide a kind of, like, economic incentive, for for for those who are partaking in it in a way that isn't, like, too too financialized or whatever else, which I think is, like, you know, for for for someone who isn't, like, maybe deep in the weeds on the technical stuff, they're like, what does that mean? You know? Like, this is, like, actually really important and really, really, really big implications. But I'm curious if you can talk a bit about because some people probably they may not know what z k snarks are and what this type of, cryptography is. If you want to maybe explain a little bit what that is and how that gives guarantees to to people using the system.
Yeah. Well, that's
Good luck. Well, maybe I can give maybe I can give like the the the usual example of how zero knowledge proofs are explained, and then maybe you can add on to that to see if that's, if that's correct. Like, the usual Sure. Kind of example that that people give is, you know, whenever for example, in in The US, you can't go into a bar unless you're over 21. And so you have to give your identity card. What that means is when you give the identity card to the to the bouncer at the bar, he is looking. He sees your name. He sees your birthday. He sees, like, your address. He sees what state you're from. He sees a whole bunch of information that he doesn't need to know in order to know that you are allowed into the bar, that you are 21. The only thing he needs to know is that you're 21. And so, he gets a lot more information than he than he actually needs. And that means, you know, in a system that is scaled up in, like, networked and technical, that means that, like, you know, people who are doing some sort of verification in which they see, like, all of your information at once just to verify one specific thing means that they get to know a lot more about you than they necessarily need to know to fulfill some sort of task. So what z k snarks allow you to do is you get to say to, for example, the bouncer at the bar, you can prove to him, I am over 21 with a legitimate identification, and that's all you need to know. And I can get into the bar, for example. That's kind of like the the layman's way I've heard it explained.
This I would say this is one of the nice properties of zk SNARKS, but it's not the main property. Mhmm. The main property of zk SNARKS is that you can verify a computation. So, let me put you another example. It can prove you that the digit number 3,000 of the p number is three. And I will only provide a cryptographic proof, which is a very small cryptographic proof, and the number three. And you can verify it, and you can be sure that the digit number 3,000 of p is three. And and you don't need to recalculate all the digits, you know. You can just trust the proof and verify yourself. And and this is this is amazing because, especially for distributed systems, because because with this technique, then you can have a network of nodes, each one performing a kind of computation, and then, you can just verify the proofs. You can distribute the work without having trust and without requiring consensus mechanisms. Mhmm. And this is, to me, the very nice property of CKU Snarks. You can use it for privacy, of course, because then you can decide what inputs, are public and with what inputs are are private and so on. But you can especially prove a computation and aggregate a lot of information in a single proof, very cheap to to verify. And this is what allowed the z k roll ups and the layer two of Ethereum. So So it's it's not the privacy part. It's more like this Right. Compression thing. You know? True. Yeah. You can have thousand votes and, compress them in a single proof Yeah. Proof
that all of them bolted for some option, for instance. Like, the the two main use cases I see is privacy preservation for, like, selective, information sharing. And then the second one is, like, memory preservation or, like, being you're allowed to save so much space or so much computation, or memory for computing things using zero knowledge proofs. Yeah. There's another another big a big a really big thing, that maybe people who don't know the technical stuff may may realize, but we're telling you it's really there are really big implications for this.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it changed everything in in distributed systems.
Mhmm. So in in many ways, it's kind of zero knowledge proofs for you guys in in the context of providing, you know, voting systems. It means is is it is it that effectively, it means we can provide, like, like, guaranteed voting. Guaranteed in the sense of, like, you can you have high, trust or high, like, verifiability that these votes that are coming in that you are computing to produce, like, what are what is the full, like, results of the vote. You can have high confidence that this is real, that this is true, and it's not expensive at the same time. Yeah. That that am I missing something else?
I think one of the the main threat of digital voting in general is, well, it's privacy in one side, but in the other is, bribery or coercion or collusion. You know? Like, this is this is something that happens in traditional voting systems. But Right. It can happen only at small scale. It cannot scale to big numbers in traditional systems. Mhmm. In digital voting, bribery and coercion can can happen in in at large scale. So this is the main issue for digital voting in general. And and this is very hard to fix because if you want to have a universal verifiability, transparency in the voting, you want to give a voter the option to follow the vote until the end, so to be sure that it was counted properly. But at the same time, you cannot provide him with a receipt receipt of both because with this receipt, he could prove to a third party what he voted for. Then this third party can just bribe on them and pay something if they wanted actually this option. So so fixing this thing was the also the main focus for us when designing this new protocol Tricky. The DaVinci protocol. Mhmm. The previous protocol is not, resistant to this kind of attacks. Mhmm. The new protocol will be, thanks to some homomorphic encryption, EKS NARC
Yeah. Advanced
cryptographic techniques that we use. Right. I think that's quite new and game changer in in digital muting systems.
Yeah. Interesting. So then how is the how do you provide is it that you don't provide a receipt to the to the voter? It's long I I mean, we have a white paper of Okay. 2028
pages that you can read. Summarize it in one sentence. Okay. So let's say that, yes, we do provide a receipt, but this receipt is not cannot be used by the by the voter. Let's say we we use many techniques. Okay? One is called re encryption of votes. So when you vote, you will have your receipt. You will you can check that your vote was actually counted. But after that, the sequencer will re encrypt your vote, so you cannot use the receipt anymore to prove to a third party what you voted for. And then we also vote undetectable vote override, meaning that you can vote as many times as you want through different sequencers or directly on chain if you want, without being detected. So, you are kind of hiding your vote over the right. So if someone is trying to to bribe you, to give you money for for for voting something, he cannot be sure that if you cast a second vote. So you're telling people
you're telling people to take the bribe and then change your vote afterwards.
Of course. But then probably won't be, possible on that system. So with this undetectable vote override, we we avoid this issue. I mean, and yeah. It's it's not like a perfect solution to the problem, but, I think it Right. It makes it, good enough in order to not be a Right. A threat on a big, big scale.
Right. Right. Right. Do you know anyone who's putting out any bribes just just for, you know, you know, just to know?
I mean, we know we know in, like, traditional voting in Spain, we have every election many like, people going, for example, to, elder asylum. I don't know if it it's called like that in English. Yeah. And then they take people Like an elderly home? Yeah. Elderly home, then take people with buses and go to to vote and also, like, pay a a sandwich and things like that to to the voters. So there's all, like, people trying to to bribe. And as I was saying, like, in the digital world, everything is more efficient, the good and the bad. So if it's if it is a possibility, people will try to to take advantage.
Right. Right. Right. That's super interesting. Yeah. More efficient evil over over, over digital spaces. So we're running a bit up on time. I was wondering if there's any kind of last things, any final plugs that you guys had for for Vakhtani. Are there, resources that you want to point people towards, your websites, your your social media? What what would you like to leave the audience with?
Sure. Yeah. Like, everyone is invited to follow us on social media. We are on, Twitter or X. We are on Firecaster. We are also on Blue Sky. And we they can visit also.io. It is our, like, main page. From there, they can also go to documentation if they're interested. And then we are launching, like, this week, a new website, avencchi.vote, that is, for this new protocol we're building. We are leading the design of this, protocol, but we want to to do with the universal voting protocol. So it's to anyone to to participate and and collaborate and so. And, yeah, one last thing from my side, would be, like, it's really, like, like, I'm I'm really scared about the the last things that are happening in in in Europe, US, and so. Like, this week, also, the the decision of Apple to accept, the The UK, government, like, request on adding a backdoor on, for example, end to end encryption of, iCloud. Then we are seeing also Sweden moving that has been, like, historically, you know, like a like a safe safe space, for for techno political projects, like, move out and and other prod private bay and other projects. We are seeing that they are also kind of, like, ban, secure, messaging, like signal or the technology that uses signals. So, like, for example, WhatsApp. So I will encourage people to take more care about this, also in the virtual world. Even on chain voting, it's really can be really scary and can't scale to the masses because, for example, it allows for easy political profiling. So I think we as a world, we maybe have to, like, go back a bit to the secret bank values and try to build more, tools for resistance. That's what we're trying to do with Volgoni. So, like, everyone is welcome also to support Volgoni to to follow what we do. You'll be part even from the network when we were gonna launch it. Thank you very much for for allowing us to to have this space here to talk about it.
Yeah. Thank you, Suresh. Yeah. Of course. Thank you guys so much, and appreciate all the work that you're doing. And, yeah, wishing you guys the best of luck. Everyone should definitely check out their resources. If you guys are a part of some sort of organization that needs, to do some mass scale voting, definitely look into Vogue Dani.
Sure.
