About

We are developing a web application that will facilitate the decentralized governance of communities of any size. The governance model that we promote is a deliberative democracy that loosely follows the details of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.01436.pdf. We have also developed a distributed ledger with WebAssembly backend that can run in the browser of all the participants without them needing expensive hardware to do wasteful calculations. Only the Merkle root of the transactions is stored on-chain and only the owners of voting power units can calculate the total amount of voting power that they have, therefore, it preserves privacy.

Solution & Product

The units that constitute the state of the distributed ledger represent the voting power of individuals in a virtual democracy. A democracy's objective is to draft a status-quo change proposal through deliberation and give the opportunity to the citizens to vote on it. The members of the community iteratively choose the "natural experts" among them as representatives in the deliberation process by engaging in a game of "liquid voting", meaning that they either choose to keep their voting power for themselves or to delegate fractions of it with some dilution to other participants. At the end of this process, those with the most accumulated voting power constitute the experts and they make corrections to the proposal that are proportional to their power at the time. Those outside of this dynamic parliament can use their voting power to veto corrections. After corrections have ended, the game of liquid voting starts again. The cycle ends when either the proposal or the parliament members or the voting power distribution remain unchanged for two consecutive periods. For this to run in the browser we have developed in-house a distributed ledger protocol in js/wasm with a custom consensus algorithm that can be executed in the browser without expensive servers that run wasteful code or that need to remember all the history of state changes. We have also developed privacy guards to ensure that no voting history can be constructed for an anonymous citizen. Papers to come in Q1 2023.

Innovation & Scalability

The underlying model of our brand of decentralized governance will follow our own research (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.01436.pdf), which to our knowledge has never been implemented. Since JS is the language of the web, everybody who has a browser will be able to use our platform and its ledger-based backend. Since the protocol does not require expensive hardware to be executed, all types of devices with an internet connection will have the chance to participate in the consensus. To our knowledge, privacy in a digital voting setting has never been achieved and it only relies on the trustworthiness of the vote collector.

Traction & achievements

We have created a Github organization (https://github.com/deliberative) that will host the source code for the ledger, the open-source part of the platform and all utility packages that we will open source. The latest example is the source code for a fast cryptography package for nodejs and the browser which is essentially a Typescript/Wasm port of libsodium, with the addition of Merkle trees and Shamir secret sharing (https://github.com/deliberative/crypto). In December 2022, we presented the deliberative democracy model at the Liquid Democracy Workshop, which was organised by DemocracyNet and took place at the University of Zurich. We have also received more than 10k in AWS credits to develop the server infrastructure for our solution. An older proof of concept smart contract is live on the Solana Devnet (https://explorer.solana.com/address/A1PS1vg9pR86X2NnS8EmBsb3z6mekL6myZ2XNXpGuzYp?cluster=devnet) and its source code is available on Github (https://github.com/fuzzc0re/deliberatively).

Team & Why Us

- Dimitris Karoukis: Founder, CEO (https://www.dkaroukis.com) The deliberative democracy model that will be used is the extension of his PhD research in Economics at Ecole Polytechnique. He has been writing code for the last 5 years and has worked as a consultant and engineer for companies in the blockchain industry and the renewables industry. - Javier Arocha: Designer-Frontend developer (https://javierarocha.github.io) Javier Arocha is a 33 Years old Venezuelan Senior Product Designer +12 years of continuous experience designing different softwares, architecture and user experience for digital products of all kinds. Based and working in Berlín, Germany for Delivery Hero SE.

Funding Needs

We need 200.000€ in order to hire: - 1 iOS engineer, - 1 android engineer, - 1 devops/secops developer, - 1 data engineer, - 1 marketing, PR.