Nouns Private Voting Research Sprint

A mandated round where ZK/cryptography researchers are encouraged to pitch themselves to undertake a private voting research project.

Private Voting Requirements

Musts

• Privacy is preserved forever; e.g. designs where voter identity is exposed when counting votes, or at any point post vote casting are not acceptable.
• At no point should the number of votes a voter has be connected to an on-chain vote; e.g. if one's balance (voting power) is exposed on any on-chain tx, it becomes very easy to identify whale accounts.
  • Should be impossible to tally a proposal's votes before the voting period ends; the reason is that if tallying is possible, whale votes become easily identifiable.
• Should support delegates as well as token owners.
• Double voting must not be possible.
• Support multisig contract wallets; many Nouns are held in Gnosis Safes and other smart contracts and we'd like to preserve their privacy as well.
• Support hardware wallets.
• Avoid centralized dependencies; any off-chain computation should run open source code and allow multiple parties to participate, to optimize for censorship resistance and redundancy.
• Should not require a trusted setup / ceremony for every prop (voting round).
• Should be scalable, allowing for growth in the number of voters from roughly 100 today to 10K in the future.
• Not every token holder should be required to vote, and if a voter registration round is required, not every registered voter should be required to show up to vote.
• Should not require an admin to trigger steps in the voting process.
• Should not require voters to deposit collateral to be allowed to vote.
• The output must be the vote tally of each proposal: # for votes, # against votes and # abstain votes, with abstain being nice-to-have. The final decision whether a proposal passes or fails should be left to the DAO's smart contract.

Nice to Have

• Voters should not have to transfer their voting power (e.g. Nouns) from their wallets to a 3rd party smart contract.
• Voters should not have to bridge their Nouns to a rollup or another chain.
• Voters should be able to vote with a single submission of an Ethereum tx / message signature / proof; more steps voters must take render suggested designs less attractive.
• Voters should not be required to perform additional pre-voting steps.
• Support some voters choosing to vote publicly.
• Voting (proof submission) should occur on Ethereum mainnet.
• Should rely solely on proofs, and not include a dispute period to achieve finality.

Additional Technical Specs

• We're fine with a multi-day delay between vote end and when votes are tallied.
• We're unsure whether voters should be able to prove how they voted to others or not; we'd love your help exploring the pros and cons of such a feature.

Terms

Each team:

• Will receive ongoing attention and support from the Verbs team, Noun 40 and other highly interested DAO members.
• Should strive to submit their best design within 3 months.

Deliverables

• Please make all research outputs open source.
• Please share all designs you've explored and highlight the pros and cons of each design.
• For your preferred design, please include an open source proof-of-concept.

Compensation

• Up to three teams can win this round and get funded.
• To win your proposal must exceed the quorum of 300 votes, and be in the top three.
  • Each Noun represents 10 PropHouse points, so 300 votes means 30 Nouns.
• Each winning team will receive 70,000 USDC.

Upon completion, the DAO will likely want to engage the team with the best-fitting design, to collaborate towards a mainnet deployment. The Verbs team stands ready to support these efforts.

Your Pitch

Please elaborate as much as possible. Try to include:

• Team members and their background.
• What you've done together as a team.
• The broad direction(s) you're planning to research.
• Your contact information; some teams might be approached by select DAO members to gather more information ahead of the vote.

Thank you!