A Treasury System for Cryptocurrencies: Enabling Better Collaborative Intelligence

Bingsheng Zhang; Roman Oliynykov; Hamed Balogun

Paper 2018/435

A Treasury System for Cryptocurrencies: Enabling Better Collaborative Intelligence

Bingsheng Zhang

Roman Oliynykov

Hamed Balogun

Abstract

A treasury system is a community controlled and decentralized collaborative decision-making mechanism for sustainable funding of the blockchain development and maintenance. During each treasury period, project proposals are submitted, discussed, and voted for; top-ranked projects are funded from the treasury. The Dash governance system is a real-world example of such kind of systems. In this work, we, for the first time, provide a rigorous study of the treasury system. We modeled, designed, and implemented a provably secure treasury system that is compatible with most existing blockchain infrastructures, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. More specifically, the proposed treasury system supports liquid democracy/delegative voting for better collaborative intelligence. Namely, the stake holders can either vote directly on the proposed projects or delegate their votes to experts. Its core component is a distributed universally composable secure end-to-end verifiable voting protocol. The integrity of the treasury voting decisions is guaranteed even when all the voting committee members are corrupted. To further improve efficiency, we proposed the world’s first honest verifier zero-knowledge proof for unit vector encryption with logarithmic size communication. This partial result may be of independent interest to other cryptographic protocols. A pilot system is implemented in Scala over the Scorex 2.0 framework, and its benchmark results indicate that the proposed system can support tens of thousands of treasury participants with high efficiency.

Note: Paper has been updated.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Published elsewhere. The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS 2019.
DOI: 10.14722/ndss.2019.23024
Contact author(s): b zhang2009 @ gmail com
History: 2023-03-23: last of 5 revisions; 2018-05-14: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2018/435
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/435,
      author = {Bingsheng Zhang and Roman Oliynykov and Hamed Balogun},
      title = {A Treasury System for Cryptocurrencies: Enabling Better Collaborative Intelligence},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2018/435},
      year = {2018},
      doi = {10.14722/ndss.2019.23024},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/435}
}