Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital fund, has launched Cicada, a Solidity library that enables anonymous voting on Ethereum. The system prevents hackers from knowing an individual voter’s choice until polling ends. Cicada relies on time-lock puzzles, a type of cryptography that allows users to encrypt secret values that only become available for decryption after a specific period has passed. A16z, the release’s engineers, experienced an obstruction to creating fair voting on the blockchain because each choice must be encoded as a boolean value of “1” or “0”. Cicada resolves this issue by requiring voters to submit a zero-knowledge proof of ballot validity with each ballot that provides proof that votes are encoded correctly without revealing the contents of the vote. A16z suggested that Cicada’s obstacle could be resolved by combining Cicada with systems like Semaphore, Semacaulk, or zero-knowledge state proofs. By brute-forcing the principles governing the system, they confirmed that the vote was cast by an eligible voter but will not reveal the credentials used to prove the voter’s eligibility.
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I've been involved in the cryptocurrency world since 2016 and trading since 2019. I started Moon and Lambo in 2021. I'm passionate about crypto and love to share my knowledge. I hate bankers and I hope that cryptocurrency will change the financial world for the better. View full profile...
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