Oasis is proud to launch a newly created platform called Blockvote that allows anyone (i.e., users, builders, community managers, researchers) to run polls to gather valuable information while setting configurable privacy options and token gating to ensure the security, confidentiality, and verifiability of all respondents. 

Oasis spends a lot of time thinking about governance processes and voting technology as a leading privacy ecosystem in Web3, and this application is one step toward extending confidentiality for onchain voting and making related processes easier and more engaging. Blockvote isn't just another voting platform; it's a fundamental rethink of how to make better collective decisions. 

Start playing with Blockvote here. Or keep reading to explore how it works and why it is needed. 

Existing Problems for DAO Voting

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are ground zero for experiments in group decision-making in crypto-native systems, and many of them provide stark examples of organizational dysfunction. Part of the problem faced by DAO governance is entities that focus only on major governance votes rather than the smaller everyday decisions that shape communities (temperature checks, opinion polls, and signal gathering). 

Other problems faced by DAOs come from the evolution of Ethereum and its layers. Most DAOs were established on Ethereum when transaction costs were a massive barrier to participation. For instance, a DAO with 15,000 members that wants them all to vote could very quickly spike gas prices. Even at just a few dollars per transaction, putting one question to a DAO vote comes with a five-digit price tag. Many DAOs moved to L2s to avoid this, but in practice, this migration can also require bridging DAO tokens back and forth whenever someone needs to vote. And if the tokens happened to be staked somewhere else, then a would-be respondent is simply out of luck. Even though some DAOs have been operational for more than five years, these elementary problems persist.

One workaround that many DAOs have chosen is delegated voting, the process of granting a delegate the power to vote on someone’s behalf during governance decisions. But this alternative structure creates new problems. 

• How do delegates figure out what their constituents want? 
• How can delegates be truly representative of the DAO?
• What happens if a delegate abuses their voting power? 

Another voting mechanism, snapshot voting, which takes a ‘snapshot’ of wallet balances at the moment the voting period starts, is also problematic, particularly on Layer 1 networks, because many DAOs didn't deploy with the ERC-20 votes token standard. That adds overhead to every single transfer, and if an onchain organization wants Merkle proofs for every vote on L1, it's even more expensive. Off-chain snapshots aren’t a viable alternative because the decisions aren't really binding. 

In the end, many “successful” proposals pass with a 99% approval rate from the DAO, which raises the obvious question of whether they are real decisions or just an expensive rubber-stamping exercise.

Inclusive, Nuanced Decision-Making

DAOs have been operational for years, but they still use the decision-making processes that humans have used for centuries or maybe millennia:

• Someone crafts a proposal.
• The community votes to pass or deny it. 

But these proposals are high effort and all-or-nothing events that might require weeks or even months of work only to end in a simple binary “yes” or “no” decision. Nuance has no place in this system.

Worse yet, only the finished product is visible onchain while all of that thinking and iteration leading to the proposal is hidden from DAO members until it's potentially too late for them to meaningfully influence that decision. 

DAOs are also often locked into governance structures that are technically difficult or practically impossible to change once deployed. This leaves only a binary all-or-nothing approach when there are fantastic frameworks for making decisions—like the Delphi method, RAPID, or consensus-based approaches—that could be applied.

Private, Customizable Voting Systems

Privacy is a hallmark of democratic processes globally, and it’s equally important for onchain decisions. Oasis has enabled privacy onchain for these processes by building a completely customizable voting system where a community administrator can control everything from fine-tuning who gets to vote to how their votes are weighted. Maybe one community wants to reduce whale influence by using a logarithmic scale of tokens. Or maybe another community decides to create a more democratic system where everyone gets exactly one vote regardless of holdings. 

But privacy is not about hiding; it's about having the freedom to express your true opinion without fear or pressure, which is where the onchain transparency of DAO voting is a sticking point. When everything is public, there's no guardrail against vote buying, coercion, and other forms of bias. Best of all, Blockvote has customizable privacy settings for each poll, so users can select different options based on what is appropriate for each question. Each poll can have its own privacy settings and weighting systems. The optionality of this granularity allows crypto to foster more open DAO governance processes while addressing user needs.

Decision fatigue has also been factored into the creation of Blockvote. The key here is flexibility and adapting as contexts change. Blockvote allows DAOs to ask the right people the right questions at the right time because everyone does not have the time to think deeply through every aspect of a complex proposal right away. With this inclusive decision-making process, people are familiarized with what will be asked instead of just presenting the final product. 

One final important feature: it's gas-free. To encourage user engagement, the gas fees for using Blockvote can be covered to ensure that participants do not incur any costs on Sapphire. 

Check out the Blockvote repo here.

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