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Welcome to the Agora wiki.

What is Agora

Agora is a e-voting platform based on a public Blockchain network and a Zero-Knowledge proof protocol. The purpose of this research project are:

• To demonstrate how, using the zero-knowledge proof cryptography, it is possible to guarantee those indispensable conditions in a voting system such as privacy and secrecy of the vote even with an open, distributed and transparent technology such as a public blockchain;
• To demostrate how electronic voting opens to new scenarios and voting mechanisms: as an example we want to develop a points voting system;
• Enforce transparent governance to facilitate the adoption of democratic rules in regions where these are absent or in any case not very transparent;
• Counteract the tendency towards abstentionism by regaining trust in the institutions;

Introduction

The most indispensable operations of a democracy are elections. Over the last few years there has been a progressive decline in voter turnout in Europe and Western countries in general. The causes of this phenomenon can be different and we will not investigate them here, but electronic voting could represent a change that would allow people to regain trust in institutions and elections.

Electronic voting allows operations to be carried out remotely but many concerns have been expressed about the fact that they can be manipulated. The latest algorithms guarantee privacy, anonymity and transparency of voting mechanisms, along with clear verifiability of the vote. Despite this, security incidents still occur and an electronic vote system that satisfies all the required characteristics has yet to be realized.

Blockchain technology and Dapps have high potential compared to electronic voting due to its characteristics of immutability, traceability and transparency. In recent years, many steps forward have also been made in terms of voting privacy and secrecy thanks to the implementation of zero-knowledge proof encryption.

This project still leaves many critical issues open such as:

• the possibility of impersonation due to the difficulties in authenticating the voter;
• scalability problems especially on a large amount of data;
• the possibility of cyber attacks of various types;

Anyway one of the most important technical aspects that we want to investigate with Agora, is the possibility to introduce privacy and confidentiality transactions in a system, the blockchain technology, that is by its nature open, public and transparent. This possibility opens scenarios that go beyond the use case of blockchain technology explored in Agorà, a governance system.