Aragon x Enclave: Verifiable Secret Ballots for Onchain Governance
Aragon and Enclave are working to introduce verifiable secret ballots built on Enclave’s encrypted execution network and reference protocol CRISP.
Once live, DAOs and other onchain entities can enable verifiable secret ballots and private voting through Aragon OSx, with minimal setup and no reliance on trusted coordinators.
Read Aragon's partnership announcement.
Introduction
In governance, transparency alone does not guarantee trust. It only guarantees visibility.
As onchain organizations evolve, confidentiality becomes not a preference but a precondition for honest participation. When every vote is public, outcomes often drift toward signaling alignment rather than expressing conviction.
By integrating Enclave, Aragon extends its modular governance stack into a new dimension: verifiable privacy.
Enclave introduces an encrypted execution layer that enables decisions to be processed collaboratively without exposing raw inputs, transforming how privacy operates onchain.
Rather than relying on trusted coordinators or hardware, Enclave distributes trust cryptographically across a network of Ciphernodes. These nodes work together to decrypt only the final result, keeping individual votes private and maintaining confidentiality across the entire process.
The result is verifiable secret ballots native to Aragon OSx: private in process, public in outcome. DAOs can vote confidentially, verify results onchain, and coordinate without intermediaries.
What This Integration Does
- Enables confidential, provably secure voting inside Aragon OSx.
- Executes entirely on encrypted data through Encrypted Execution Environments (E3s).
- Removes trusted intermediaries, distributing trust across nodes.
- Produces publicly verifiable results using proofs.
Why It Matters
- More honest participation: privacy lets members vote freely.
- No single point of failure: coordinator-free, distributed trust.
- Provable correctness: tallies can never be falsified.
- Modular privacy: apply confidentiality where it is needed most.
Under the Hood
- Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE): keeps every vote encrypted, from submission through tally.
- Multi-Party Computation (MPC): combine collaborative computation with threshold decryption.
- Zero-Knowledge Proofs: prove tally accuracy without revealing individual votes.
- Incentivized nodes: enforce integrity through shared cryptoeconomic guarantees.
For Aragon Users (coming soon)
- Quick setup: will integrate directly into Aragon OSx with minimal configuration.
- Flexible UX: DAOs will be able to choose between Aragon’s default interface or a custom frontend.
- Seamless operation: designed to preserve existing governance workflows while adding stronger privacy guarantees.
- Configurable privacy: can apply verifiable secret ballots to sensitive proposals while keeping others transparent.
- DAO-level control: voting parameters, eligibility, and quorum rules remain fully customizable within Aragon.
- Verifiable transparency: cryptographic proofs for each vote will be stored onchain, enabling public verification without revealing identities.
- Familiar experience: voters will use the same interface they already know, with privacy built in.
This integration is one of many ways Enclave’s encrypted execution network can be applied, from governance and auctions to research and AI.
If you’re building applications or systems that require confidentiality, verifiability, or multi-party computation, explore the docs at docs.enclave.gg or reach out about integrations.