# "How we Brought Cypherpunk Values to Real world elections" by Jordi Pinyana // Cypherpunk Congress 2 - Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress) - Date: 2026-01-09 - Duration: 15:53 - Topics: web3, privacy, now, crypto, cryptography, blockchain, data, security, human right, rights, tech, technology, internet, open source, free, freedom, ethereum, hackers, ethics, cypherpunk, dev, developer, dapp, decentralization, bitcoin, computer, surveillance, cyber, peer2peer, p2p, love, solidity, zk, zero knowledge, education, academy, w3pn, congress, ethereum cypherpunk, buenos aires, argentina, vitalik buterin, privacidad, filecoin, foundation - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt--pi1cGkbxX4 - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pi1cGkbxX4 ## Description Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress by Web3Privacy Now is the world's largest cypherpunk and human rights event. 4500 people gathering in Buenos Aires to celebrate privacy with internet freedom leaders like Richard Stallman, Vitalik Buterin, Roger Dingledine, and Eva Galperin. Join us in building a free internet for all. Website: https://web3privacy.info/ Congress site: https://congress.web3privacy.info/ ## Transcript [applause] >> Thank you so much. So, yeah, let's just start. Uh my name is Jordi Piñana. I'm a core contributor to the Bogdani project and today I'm going to explain how we brought Cypherpunk values to real world elections. So, first of all, I want to say thank you for being here and to be and to care about this kind of of stuff. It's It's really important for us. So, first of all, let me put you in context. We are in Catalonia in the 1st of October 2017. Uh the Catalan people wanted to organize a referendum of independence to check uh with civil society if they wanted to become an independent state from Spain in a form of Republic or they wanted to stay in Spain. We had opinions from both sides, but the important thing is that people wanted to decide. You can see how much people wanted to decide. Uh yeah, we were expecting to have a democratic, no problem voting process, but this is actually what happened. So, people uh got prosecuted for voting in a democratic and in a pacific way. And basically the central government of Spain sent the military police to beat people for voting in a democratic state in the 21st century in a European country. This is crazy. And at that point uh some uh activists, political activists, engineers, we unite uh for creating uh digital voting system that avoids this. I don't want to see these images ever again. And yeah, let's uh go to the Cypherpunk Manifesto. Why privacy is important in these scenarios? So, privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world. It's necessary privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. And we, the Cypherpunks, we write free and open source code, code that cannot be destroyed and is unstoppable. So, why we need this? Because this should never happen again in any country, anywhere in the world. So, first, why privacy is essential in these cases? Because we need to protect the voter. Protecting the voter prevents coercion and intimidation, strengthens trust in the system, encourages honest participation, and prevents vote buying. And also protects voters against retaliation as we see as we saw in the in the past image. But this is not the only side of the history. There's another side. We need to empower the organizer. The The organizer can also face retaliation. We need to provide guidance, increase legitimacy, reduce costs because now nowadays it's super expensive to organize a voting process with all the democratic guarantees. And we need to offer end-to-end solutions that are flexible to the organization needs. So, current digital existing voting existing solutions, they are expensive, they are centralized, they are insecure, and inaccessible. Nowadays cost between three and five dollars per voter to organize a secure democratic election and this is only on the hands of few nation states. Then the technology is centralized. So, the only way they can offer security is through obfuscation and it's full of single points of failure. It's insecure, so there are no peer reviews. The code it's closed source and it's prone to tampering and manipulation. Also, it's inaccessible. Only it's only accessible through private companies and there are very few private companies that offer this kind of services. And you go to the And when you go to the open source realm, all of the all of the technology it's super difficult to use and it's not meant to be used by normal people. So, you can see there's a lot of proof in the media about what happens when you use these kind of centralized and opaque systems. We see backdoor discovered in Swiss voting, second flaw in the Swiss voting, uh vote fraud claims in United States, in the Congo, in Venezuela, even in some uh sport clubs uh they were uh experimented some tampering in the voting. So, that's why we need a universal, digital first, unstoppable voting system. A system that enables secure, transparent, end-to-end verifiable, censorship resistant, and democratic decision-making processes. It should be built and delivered in a free and open source fashion and should leverage cryptography and distributed systems. And hey, do not forget that it needs to be inclusive and universally accessible because we are talking about voting and everyone have the vote have the right to vote. So, how we approach the problem? First, of course, we need blockchain technology. We cannot imagine a system, a proper voting system that doesn't run in a transparency and secure layer as a blockchain. So, we need to use We wanted to use cutting edge technology wherever possible, but without impacting the user experience. We needed to accept some trade-off only when they need to improvements over existing solutions, which is not that is not that difficult. Uh we wanted to create a public good, so anyone can build on top of it. Imagine the TCP/IP, but for voting. Uh but we need a business on top of it because it's super difficult to get funding from for um uh public projects and projects that are defined as a public good. So, there's a business model on top of it. We need to build easy and secure uh flexible tools, but we need to and but we need to stay pragmatic even though we need to fight for the vision that we have. And a really important thing I need to take into account is that we need to engage and educate all actors from private, public, and third sector because otherwise at some point, if we don't do it now, at some point another centralized company will come and we will end up having the same results. So, yeah. Uh technically speaking, our journey started in 2017. We forged Zcash and we were sending votes as Zcash transactions because uh Zcash has all the privacy properties we wanted, but it lacked programmability. In 2018, we developed a proof-of-authority network based on Ethereum, but at that point we didn't have the cryptographic primitives uh required for doing so and also scalability was a problem. Then we switched to a Tendermint-based approach. If you don't know, a Tendermint is the base uh technology which empowers uh the Cosmos ecosystem. Uh it's about sovereign chains and app-specific blockchains. So, we didn't needed to take care about uh the consensus and peer-to-peer layer and we also we only focused on creating the state machine for voting. This is actually technology that all the people that is using Bogdani nowadays, uh the clients and uh other people are using. And yeah, since 2024, we revisited the Ethereum ecosystem and we were sure that this was the future. All the applied cryptography, the scalability issues were solved and yeah, this is the new protocol what that we are working on. It's called DaVinci. So, about the voting protocol, DaVinci stands for Decentralized Autonomous Voting Integrity Network with cryptographic inference. It's decentralized and anonymous because the protocol can run autonomously, so there are no central parties and uses EVM contracts and a purpose-specific ZK roll-up. We call it Voting Integrity Network because it's made It's It's run by incentivized network of sequencers that accumulates, verify, encrypt, and aggregate the votes cast by the user. And we use the word cryptographic inference because the network derive conclusions, so the tally, exclusively exclusively, sorry, uh from cryptographic premises fully backed by zero-knowledge proof. So, basically how it works, we have three actors, okay? So, we have the voters, we have the sequencers, and we have an EVM-compatible chain. The voters encrypt their vote using homomorphic encryption and prove the integrity using ZK-SNARKs. Also, they prove that they are in the census, so in the list in the list of eligible voters using uh Merkle tree-based ZK-SNARKs. Then these votes are were sent to this network of sequencers and the sequencers what they do is to accumulate these votes, verify that the state transition of the Merkle tree of all the process is uh properly done, and they they they sent uh cryptographic proof to Ethereum, so we can trace back all. Basically, what you can do is since the point you sent you cast the vote, since the tally, you can check mathematically that the vote was not altered and the results were computed correctly. So, how the voting experience looks like? And this is like uh the talk And this is, sorry, what the talk about. So, we managed to put all this thing into a nice UI that anyone can use. And this is the experience of the voter. Basically, you receive a link through email, through uh SMS, or through any other uh mean, for example, a certified letter. And then you have a link. You access the link and the other and the only thing you see is like the name of the voting process, the description, the questions, and the possible results that they will be at some point. Then you need to identify yourself. In that sense, we are very flexible on identification mechanisms, so it's up to the organization how they want to verify their users. And it also depend on the level of security they need. In this case, in this example, I will be authenticating myself with my name, my email, and then I will receive a two-factor authentication code to verify that I'm to to try to uh downgrade like the the civil attacks. So, in that case, the user authenticates themself, I receive the code, and I have another uh confirmation screen here that I'm saying you are voting for this process and this is the vote you are going to cast. Basically, you confirm the vote and that's it. You don't need to need to do anything else. You don't need to deal with web 3 tags, so everything is transparent for the user. And at the end you receive a unique identifier that will be useful for you to tracking your vote to check that everything was fine in the voting process. This as I said, we also need to work for the to for the organizations and to make them use the technology in a seamless way. So, that's why we created this dashboard here. It's super simple. You just have you can create new votes. You can upload your member base. We have some templates for annual general meetings, elections, participatory budgeting, and then you just need to configure the voting, upload your census, and configure the vote the authentication. You don't need to do anything else. You publish the vote and then anyone can vote. So, yeah, this is the part that I'm most most excited about. We already provide this kind of technology to real world organizations. We can see here different verticals from public administrations, membership associations, integrators, unions and professional bodies, corporate governance, political parties, and the sports and entertainment clubs. I want to showcase one of the uh biggest use case we had because I'm very proud of it. So, we helped the Belarus opposition. Uh the Belarus opposition is a political party that now is in the exile because they're being prosecuted in the in the in their country and they used Vocdoni for holding transparent and verifiable elections under international observation. We also find private organizations like the Football Club Barcelona where their member base where distributed was is distributed, sorry, across the globe and they wanted to increase participation and to reduce costs. We also have some public bodies. For example, we held the first official referendum with binding execution in Spain in the municipality of Bilbaut. And we're working with the city of Barcelona piloting the first digital a digital first voting system. Uh if this initiative succeed, probably next year will be extended to all the province which has 5.6 million inhabitants. Also, the one of the things that I'm most proud is we contributed to the Spanish politics. So, it was a pivotal high-stake voting determining Catalonian presidency and Spain government stability. So, Esquerra Republicana in this case had the key votes for investing Pedro Sanchez as the prime minister of Spain and they wanted to ask their user base for voting for this. So, yeah, we powered also this election. So, yeah, just uh some lessons learned during these years. Legislation is not friendly most of the times, but you can go around it and you can find your way. Uh you know how to open an email, but your grandmother does not. You should provide a seamless UX and you should sometimes enable physical polling stations that use digital voting mechanisms, but that way you can make them understand how it works. Identity and authentication is fragmented and I don't think this will be solved anytime soon. So, that's why we need to provide this flexible uh authentication system. Also, when you go to companies, companies care about money. Having the best technology is nothing. So, if you can reduce their cost and make their life easy for them and for their voters, they will go all in. And yeah, the public sector is worried. They are afraid of this kind of technologies and with a good reason. During the past 20 years we failed delivering proper digital voting. But now the times change. And also, all sectors want an end-to-end service and you must cover all phases. No one wants to be wants to be accountable. So, you should provide an easy and and and a cost-effective way that covers all the phases of the voting process since the census creation to the to the tally. It takes time to earn trust and only one mistake to lose it. Also, proper digital voting is an ultra difficult subject. Pro- Creating a digital voting system that fulfills all the democratic guarantees, so anonymity, privacy, end-to-end verifiability, universal verifiability, and all these properties that are written in a United Nations letter, it's super easy, but now we are closer than ever. And also, yeah, we'll something that can be easily used and integrated by anyone. Takeaways. When you try digital voting, you cannot look back. The turnout increased drastically. In participatory budgeting we're talking that we're going from from 3 to 5% to almost 30 to 40% on average. And on high-stake elections like the ones I explained for the Spanish politics, it was almost 90% participation. The narrative for the public sector is legitimacy and convenience and for the private and third sector is cost and convenience. Um yeah, that's most of it. I would like to share this with you. We are going to present it tomorrow officially, but we wrote a manifesto because we are tired that democracy is under threat. Democracies are failing to us and we are not a spectators. We are the ones that need to make democracy thrive. So, this is a manifesto for collective freedom, so it I would be very happy that you can sign it and help us to reimagine democracy. Here you can find the resources. Vocdoni.io is the main web page. Davinci.vote uh is the web page for the protocol that we are working on. You can go to GitHub. Everything is open source. Take everything you want. Here your contact and that's it. Thank you so much. >> [applause]