Empirical Analysis of On-chain Voting with Smart Contracts
Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/Report › Conference contribution › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
Abstract
Blockchains and smart contracts promise transparency, verifiability, and self-enforcing agreements. Against this background, novel use cases such as decentralized governance platforms that implement voting to collectively manage funds have emerged. While a number of arguments against blockchain-based voting exist, we still see a relevance. In this paper, we therefore present a quantitative analysis of the Ethereum blockchain with respect to voting. To this end, we develop a blockchain analysis toolchain that we use to analyze 3 173 smart contracts on the Ethereum Mainnet with voting functionality. We extract insights on the complexity of deployed voting methods and reveal a trend towards a centralization of funds, i.e., five smart contracts manage 98% of funds comprising more than four million USD. We additionally analyze the feasibility of on-chain voting for Ethereum as well as other well-established blockchains that are used for voting, i.e., Bitcoin and Dash.
Details
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2021 International Workshops - CoDecFin, DeFi, VOTING, and WTSC, Revised Selected Papers |
| Editors | Matthew Bernhard, Andrea Bracciali, Lewis Gudgeon, Thomas Haines, Ariah Klages-Mundt, Shin'ichiro Matsuo, Daniel Perez, Massimiliano Sala, Sam Werner |
| Pages | 397 - 412 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Publication status | Published - Mar 2021 |
| Peer-reviewed | Yes |
| Externally published | Yes |
External IDs
| Scopus | 85115842316 |
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Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Keywords
- Analysis, Blockchain, Smart contract, Voting