ShapeShift

SCP 112: Governance Voting Enhancement-Shielded Voting

Summary

Implement an upgrade to current voting processes. This would be accomplished by using shielded voting.

Abstract

This proposal would implement shielded voting for all future governance proposals. Shielded voting is a voting mechanism offered by Snapshot that is deployed on the Shutter Network, using cryptographic thresholds to prevent the front running of votes. Threshold cryptography would enable a group of key holders to create a cryptographic lock that can be opened if a threshold of members (key holders) participate/collaborate. This process would ensure that no one person or group of people would have access to unlock voting results early to potentially influence a proposal. During active proposals shielded voting would encrypt all individual results, only displaying the total amount of voting power that has been deployed. Once voting as concluded the lock would automatically be removed displaying the detailed results, including who vote for what outcome of the proposal.

Motivation

The implementation of shielded voting within the DAO would a allow us to maintain transparency in our voting as it is today, but also create a layer of privacy for those members who are voting, to not have their votes shared until the proposal has concluded. This would also help to elevate the front running of votes, as previously mentions, as well as voting apathy, information asymmetry, and lower participation. Thus, shielded voting could provide non-influenced results in governance, where voting members are encouraged to vote on how their thoughts of the proposal versus the voting power that has been deployed, who has voted, or even being discouraged to vote because of the visual representation that their vote may not matter.

Specification

If this proposal passes, shielded voting will be enabled in the ShapeShift DAO’s SnapShot space settings, and a note on shielded voting will be added to the FOX Governance Process.

In the event that bugs with the beta release of shielded voting cause issues with the governance process, shielded voting may be temporarily disabled until the issues are resolved.

Benefits

The benefits of shielded voting are simple:

1) Increase in privacy during active proposals
2) Less influenced voting
3) Greater participation in governance

Drawbacks

The Shutter Network acknowledges that the shielded voting system should be considered to be as a beta release. They cite three specific items that could be risks. They are as follow:

1) The underlying threshold encryption is new and may contain unknown bugs.
2) The infrastructure to communicate the encryption and decryption keys between 			    Snapshot and Shutter is equally as new.
3) In the initial deployment of the Keyper set (key holders) will not be decentralized.	

Shutter Network also states that due to the way threshold encryption works that there is the possibility that the decryption may fail, but that they take every precaution to avoid this.

Voting

For/Yes- The community recognized the value of shielded voting and would like to implement Against/No- The community does not want to implement shielded voting