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Empirical Analysis of On-chain Voting with Smart Contracts

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2021 International Workshops (FC 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12676))

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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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-20.md

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1202.md

  3. 3.

    https://cloud.google.com/bigquery

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/blockchain-etl/ethereum-etl

  5. 5.

    https://www.4byte.directory

  6. 6.

    https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1oIxMjJu7LQvSMnXiIgC9S_5CgGA_5d2R

  7. 7.

    https://github.com/robmuth/blockchain-voting-analysis

  8. 8.

    Exchange rate at the time of writing was 407 USD per ETH (source: coinbase.com)

  9. 9.

    https://github.com/projectchicago/gastoken

  10. 10.

    https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0009.mediawiki

  11. 11.

    https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0141.mediawiki

  12. 12.

    https://www.dashcentral.org

  13. 13.

    http://coinmarketcap.com/en/currencies/dash/historical-data/ (2020-11-16)

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Robert Muth & Florian Tschorsch

Authors
  1. Robert Muth
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  2. Florian Tschorsch
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Robert Muth or Florian Tschorsch .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Matthew Bernhard

  2. Computer Science and Mathematics, Stirling University, Stirling, UK

    Andrea Bracciali

  3. Imperial College London, London, UK

    Lewis Gudgeon

  4. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Thomas Haines

  5. Ithaca College, Ithaca, USA

    Ariah Klages-Mundt

  6. Department of Computer Science, Georgetown University, Washington, WA, USA

    Shin'ichiro Matsuo

  7. Imperial College London, London, UK

    Daniel Perez

  8. Dipartimento di Matematica, University of Trento, Trento, Trento, Italy

    Massimiliano Sala

  9. Imperial College London, London, UK

    Sam Werner

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Muth, R., Tschorsch, F. (2021). Empirical Analysis of On-chain Voting with Smart Contracts. In: Bernhard, M., et al. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2021 International Workshops. FC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12676. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-63958-0_32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-63958-0_32

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-63958-0

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