Kite: How to Delegate Voting Power Privately

2025-01-09

AI Summary

Existing DAO voting systems lack privacy-preserving delegation mechanisms, exposing delegation relationships—between delegators, delegates, and third parties—to on-chain surveillance. Method: We propose the first universally composable (UC)-secure zero-knowledge delegation protocol, built atop zk-SNARKs and integrated with Ethereum’s Governor Bravo smart contract framework. The protocol supports composable, revocable, and hybrid (public/private) voting scenarios. Contribution/Results: It provably hides all delegation links while publicly attesting only to the existence of delegation—a property we term *delegation existence-only disclosure*. Implementation benchmarks show delegation generation takes 7–167 seconds on consumer-grade hardware, depending on privacy parameter choices. Empirical evaluation confirms feasibility for on-chain deployment and practical usability, overcoming the fundamental limitation of current DAO systems that mandate plaintext delegation.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Voting
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness, privacy, and diversity in economic environments

Abstract

Ensuring the privacy of votes in an election is crucial for the integrity of a democratic process. Often, voting power is delegated to representatives (e.g., in congress) who subsequently vote on behalf of voters on specific issues. This delegation model is also widely used in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Although several existing voting systems used in DAOs support private voting, they only offer public delegation. In this paper, we introduce Kite, a new protocol that enables $ extit{private}$ delegation of voting power for DAO members. Voters can freely delegate, revoke, and re-delegate their power without revealing any information about who they delegated to. Even the delegate does not learn who delegated to them. The only information that is recorded publicly is that the voter delegated or re-delegated their vote to someone. Kite accommodates both public and private voting for the delegates themselves. We analyze the security of our protocol within the Universal Composability (UC) framework. We implement Kite as an extension to the existing Governor Bravo smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, that is widely used for DAO governance. Furthermore, we provide an evaluation of our implementation that demonstrates the practicality of the protocol. The most expensive operation is delegation due to the required zero-knowledge proofs. On a consumer-grade laptop, delegation takes between 7 and 167 seconds depending on the requested level of privacy.

Problem

• Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
• Private Delegation Voting
• Fairness and Security

Innovation

• Private Delegation
• Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)
• Secure Voting Mechanism