When India came together to vote at ETHIndia

Introduction

Hard to believe, but it’s already been a month since ETHIndia 2024 wrapped up! The energy this year was something we live and breathe for. The judges' feedback on the projects built was much beyond our expectations and we knew we had do something more to get the projects more recognition and support.

For a while now, we’ve been brainstorming with the Anon Aadhaar team on how to scale Quadratic Voting across India (fun fact: We had QV via Anon Aadhaar ready and working for ETHIndia 2023, but couldn’t proceed due to a reply attack caused by how the nullifier was generated). The incredible quality of projects submitted at ETHIndia 2024 gave us the perfect reason to finally execute this experiment.

Once ETHIndia ‘24 officially ended, our team switched gears to improving QV via Anon Aadhar on the Devfolio platform and making last minute ad-hoc changes. QV was open for ETHIndia '24 builders from Dec 10 - 20, 2024, and on the final day, we opened the floodgates to all Indians. With an initial Matching Pool of 4.337 ETH, Anon Aadhaar made permissionless, Sybil-resistant voting a reality, giving every project a chance to garner support and feedback from a nationwide audience.

PSA 📢

To keep the process fair, we evaluated votes cast both before and after the Anon Aadhaar integration, and decided to give each project the higher Matching Amount between the two. To ensure this, we’re increasing the total Matching Pool to 7.2516 ETH! 💰

You can find the share of votes and the resulting Matching Amount pre and post Anon Aadhaar integration in this sheet: https://nsb.dev/ethindia2024-quadratic-voting

Now, let’s take a closer look at how everything came together.

What is Quadratic Voting (QV)?

In a general sense, instead of a binary yes/no system, or a one-person, one-vote system, QV allows voters to express how much they care about something by enabling them to choose the intensity of votes.

Since a wide range of projects result out of a hackathon, it can be challenging to determine which projects are the most liked by the people. QV solves this.

ETHIndia 2023 was the first time we introduced QV to a large-scale hackathon, but it has been a part of many Devfolio hackathons as far back as InOut circa 2020.

Here’s how QV changes the game:

• Diverse Decision-Making: Hackathons bring together a diverse range of projects with varying appeal to the hackathon judges. QV ensures that equally diverse perspectives come together and support projects with niche or unobserved potential.
• Empowers Builders: By enabling the community to decide which projects deserve more support, QV gives builders tangible recognition and fosters collaboration between builders and their supporters.
• Enables the community: The entire community can participate in the judging process and support the projects they individually or collectively believe in. This shared responsibility brings out an overarching collective vision in the results.

Here’s a simple example explaining how QV works:

• Every eligible participant gets 100 votes to distribute.
• They distribute their votes across projects they want to support.
• Once the voting period ends, results are calculated using the QV formula to allocate the Matching Pool funds fairly.

Anon Aadhaar: What and How?

Quadratic Voting’s fairness hinges on one critical factor: every voter must be unique.

Until now, QV has been limited to the builders who participated and submitted projects. To open it to everyone, we needed a way to ensure fairness and authenticity in the voting process.

This is where Anon Aadhaar, built by brilliant minds at Privacy and Scaling Explorations enters, enabling Sybil-resistance without compromising privacy.

Anon Aadhaar made it possible for every eligible Indian to participate in QV without requiring cumbersome sign-ups or identity disclosures. It brought trust and security to the table that allowed this experiment to thrive, completely permissionless.

Watch a video walkthrough by Preet from our engineering team 👇🏼

Here’s a step-by-step process of Quadratic Voting via Anon Aadhaar:

1. Voting Opens: The QV tab went live on the ETHIndia dashboard, and eligible participants connected their Ethereum wallets to start voting.
2. Votes Distributed: Voters had 100 votes to spend on their favourite projects using a simple + or - interface. No votes could go to waste, they had to spend all 100.
3. Aadhaar Verification: Anon Aadhaar ensured that every voter was legitimate. Voters uploaded their Aadhar QR code to Devfolio to generate a Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) of their Aadhaar ID. After submitting, voters could view an attestation made against their votes on EAS Scan.
4. Results Calculated: Once the voting window closed, the QV formula distributed the 4.337 ETH Matching Pool among the projects that received votes.

Long Way Ahead!

We’re quite happy about how this experiment panned out. Its success proves that decentralized, transparent, and community-driven processes are the future, not just for hackathons but for decision-making at large, not without a long way and a lot more experiments.

To Anon Aadhaar, Privacy and Scaling Explorations, and everyone who participated, voted, and rallied their communities (special shoutout to Kalyani Government Engineering College for going all in), thank you for making this a success!

And if want to take a look at the share of votes and the resulting Matching Amount for projects, pre and post Anon Aadhaar integration, here you go: https://nsb.dev/ethindia2024-quadratic-voting

Cheers to a lot more building, good times, and experiments in 2025. Happy New Year :D

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Until next time, Never Stop Building 🛠️