Kite: How to Delegate Voting Power Privately

TL;DR

Kite is a novel protocol enabling private delegation of voting power in DAOs, allowing voters to delegate and revoke votes without revealing their choices, enhancing privacy in decentralized governance.

Contribution

We introduce Kite, the first protocol supporting private delegation of voting power in DAOs, with practical implementation and security analysis within the UC framework.

Findings

Delegation time ranges from 7 to 167 seconds on a laptop.

Kite supports both private and public voting modes.

The protocol is secure under the UC framework.

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 $\textit{private}$ 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.