The Free TON community has announced a contest that is the second stage in the development of a decentralized voting audit system for Latin America. It will last four months: from March 15 to July 14, 2021, and the winning work will be a turnkey solution for implementation.
Blockchain technology has gained popularity as an efficient cryptocurrency solution. However, its possibilities are much wider and the scope of application is much larger. One of them is the electoral system.
The Free TON community is actively involved in the blockchain voting security debate and strives to create software solutions that unleash the technology’s potential and test its capabilities in practice.
An excellent example is the search for a blockchain solution for the vote audit procedure, adapted for national elections in Latin America. The request for such a development was formed among civil society activists in Guatemala, who are interested in creating a sufficiently reliable system for checking the calculations carried out by election officials. It is about additional public control that will increase confidence in the results and help counter fraud.
The Free TON community solves this problem by a contest method, motivating developers to compete for prizes and the opportunity to see the embodiment of their idea in real life. The project is being implemented in several stages. The first has already been completed and the second has started.
Stage One: Specification
In November-December 2020, the first contest was held aimed at finding crowdsourcing solutions based on the Free TON blockchain to conduct a voting audit. The complexity of the task was the need to put forward a proposal that does not require legislative changes, and also takes into account the parallel system of vote counting by public activists that has already developed in Guatemala.
As a result, the submission won, which included a game mechanism in the audit system, motivating participants to be honest and receive special tokens for this. Based on the winner’s solution, a more formal specification has been developed, which will be implemented by the participants in the current contest.
Second Stage: Implementation
The contest calls for the development of a DeAudit smart contract system based on the community-prepared specification. The system must be deployed and tested on the DevNet, and the jury must have access to it for testing. In addition, the solution should have a Free Software license.
The jury will assess whether all actions within the solution are easily accessible through DeBots interfaces, and whether development can be scalable to millions of participants. If the test proposed by the competitor does not cover all scenarios, then the jury can develop their own tests, however, this will reduce the participant’s score.
Submissions will be evaluated on a ten-point scale and those who have passed the 4-point threshold and entered the top 10 will receive rewards. An impressive amount is intended for the first three places — 200, 150 and 100 thousand TONs, respectively. For the fourth and fifth places, the rewards will be 75 and 50 thousand TONs. For places from sixth to tenth — 25 thousand TONs each.
Pavel Prigolovko, contest initiator and TON Labs chief strategy officer, noted the exceptional importance of the work that the community is doing in this direction.
“This solution will be the first ever large-scale application of the blockchain to fulfill the tasks of civil society that are clear to everyone.
The successful implementation of such a project with the involvement of millions of people will show the real possibilities of decentralized platforms.
“Blockchain voting” will become a reality only after demonstrating the reliability and convenience of such solutions”.
In addition, Pavel Prigolovko expressed confidence that initiatives to implement this solution will emerge in different countries of the world. He believes that the Free TON community will support future initiatives to develop, refine and support the project related to the use of blockchain for electoral procedures.
Thus, the current competition is an opportunity for developers to participate in the development of a promising direction and gain experience that will be largely in demand in future blockchain voting projects.
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All contest requirements and conditions can be found in the proposal on the Free TON forum.