TL;DR

We are developing the cryptographic primitives to unlock secure, private, and truly anonymous voting. By evolving our current infrastructure into a threshold-homomorphic (ElGamal) system, we enable fully verifiable tallies that protect individual ballot privacy from end-to-end—ensuring that the only data ever revealed is the final result.

Problem Statement

On-chain governance currently faces a fundamental trade-off: privacy vs. verifiability. When voting is transparent, it creates a security risk for the protocol. Visible live tallies allow for "strategic voting," where participants react to current counts to manipulate the outcome, and open ballots leave voters vulnerable to social pressure or retaliation.

However, existing privacy solutions often rely on "black box" models that sacrifice the trustless verifiability of the blockchain. Without the ability to audit the process, the legitimacy of the entire governance system is undermined.

Solution

Shutter is moving the ecosystem toward a standard of complete private and verifiable voting. We are implementing threshold-homomorphic encryption (Threshold ElGamal), a system that allows encrypted ballots to be aggregated into a final tally without ever decrypting or revealing individual votes.

Unlike standard encryption that requires "opening" each vote to count it, this homomorphic approach unlocks:

True Anonymity: Individual choices are never exposed to any party, including the tallying nodes.
Cryptographic Verifiability: The final result is mathematically provable and auditable without compromising voter privacy.
Decentralized Security: Decryption authority is distributed across a network of "Keypers," removing single points of failure.

This work is currently being prepared for Snapshot and is the foundation for a staff council election pilot with the City of Munich, demonstrating Ethereum’s utility for high-stakes, real-world coordination.

Impact

Shutter has maintained this infrastructure as a zero-cost public good for years, providing critical security to the DAO ecosystem:

881+ DAOs protected by Shutter encryption.
372,914+ Votes encrypted to date.
87% Retention: DAOs that adopt shielded voting consistently stay with the service.
Institutional Bridge: Taking Ethereum-based primitives into the public sector via the Munich pilot.

Use of Funds

Funding supports both the maintenance of existing production systems and the delivery of anonymous homomorphic voting:

<$5k: Maintenance of the Keyper network and infrastructure for the current Snapshot integration.
$5k–$10k: Development of technical documentation and integration guides for the Munich municipal pilot.
$10k–$25k: Engineering work to transition our prototype into a production-ready threshold-ElGamal tallying system.
$25k–$50k: Technical deployment support for the City of Munich, bridging institutional identity with Ethereum-based encryption.
$50k+: Full public-good implementation and external security audit of the homomorphic stack for widespread adoption by DAOs and public institutions.