Interfold's CRISP Secures Private Voting on Blockchain with Advanced Cryptography

Blockchain-based governance has long been touted as a secure and transparent way to make collective decisions. However, one major issue has plagued the space: the lack of true privacy in voting.

In most cases, votes are cast from pseudonymous wallets on public blockchains, making it easy for anyone with a block explorer to see exactly how someone voted. This creates a host of problems beyond mere discomfort, including coercion, vote buying, and social pressure that undermines the very notion of democratic decision-making.

Enter CRISP, short for Coercion-Resistant Impartial Selection Protocol, a new protocol designed by Interfold to address this issue. By combining fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), and distributed threshold cryptography (DTC), CRISP creates a digital secret ballot that protects the privacy of voters.

Fully homomorphic encryption allows for math to be performed on encrypted data without ever decrypting it, think of it like a sealed ballot box that can count its own contents without anyone opening it. Zero-knowledge proofs verify the validity of votes without revealing individual details, and distributed threshold cryptography ensures that no single entity controls the decryption key.

Together, these cryptographic techniques address several known failure modes in existing digital voting systems, including commit-reveal schemes and trusted operator models. CRISP is designed to be receipt-free, meaning voters cannot generate proof of how they voted even if they wanted to, breaking the coercion chain entirely.