9 posts tagged with "roadmap"

Hey folks! We’re thrilled to kick off a series of tutorials covering everything you need to know about MACI. This guide will focus on installing MACI and deploying the contracts to a testnet. Let’s get started!

Understanding Roles​

MACI protocol has two main roles, User (Voter) and Coordinator. A simplified version would be to say that the coordinator is in charge of deploying the MACI smart contracts, initiating the polls, tallying the final results of a vote, and finalizing polls by publishing the final results on-chain. Usually the contract deployer is the coordinator, but this can be a separate entity.

Requirements​

Let's install the required tools first:

• Node.js: use a JS toolchain manager like nvm or volta to install Node.js. We recommend using Node 20 or above.
• pnpm: Fast, disk space efficient package manager.

Installation​

Now you can run the following commands to install MACI locally:

git clone https://github.com/privacy-scaling-explorations/maci.git && \
cd maci && \
git checkout v2.5.0 && \
pnpm i && \
pnpm run build

Download the zero knowledge artifacts​

MACI has two main zk-SNARK circuits, and each of them is parameterized. There should be one .zkey file for each circuit and set of parameters.

Unless you wish to generate a fresh set of .zkey files, you should obtain them from someone who has performed a multi-party trusted setup for said circuits. For more details on which artifacts have undergone a trusted setup, please refer to the Trusted Setup page.

Download test artifacts​

For all but production use cases, we suggest using the test artifacts, with the latest dev code, you can download them by running:

pnpm download-zkeys:test

Download ceremony artifacts​

For production you need to use the ceremony artifacts which have undergone a trusted setup, you can download them with the command:

pnpm download-zkeys:ceremony

Deploy Contracts​

Before deploying the contracts we need to do some final configurations to our repository.

Set the environment variables​

Head to the packages/contracts folder and copy the .env.example file.

cd packages/contracts && \
cp .env.example .env

Make sure to include a mnemonic and RPC url (make sure to replace NETWORK with the network you want to use).

MNEMONIC = "your ethereum secret key";
NETWORK_RPC_URL = "the eth provider url";
NETWORK_ETHERSCAN_API_KEY = "etherscan api key";

Generate Coordinator Keys​

In order to run MACI polls, a coordinator is required to publish their MACI public key. You will need to generate a MACI keypair, and treat the private key just as your ethereum private keys. Please store them in a safe place as you won't be able to finish a round if you lose access, or if compromised a bad actor could decrypt the vote and publish them online. You can generate a new key pair using maci-cli by running the following commands:

cd packages/cli && \
node build/ts/index.js genMaciKeyPair

Set the configuration file​

Head back to the contracts folder and copy the config example and update the fields as necessary:

cd ../contracts && \
cp deploy-config-example.json deploy-config.json

ConstantInitialVoiceCreditProxy​

Defines how many credits will get each voter.

Gatekeeper​

MACI uses a "gatekeeper" contract to configure and enforce the eligibility criteria of voters who can participate in MACI polls. In other words, it is a way to allowlist signups to the system to protect against sybil attacks. Please refer to the gatekeeper page in the documentation for more information on the supported Gatekeepers.

MACI​

This property defines which Gatekeeper and stateTreeDepth MACI is going to use. The stateTreeDepth defines how many users the system supports.

VkRegistry​

The VkRegistry hold the verifying keys used to verify the proofs, on the zkeys field we define the path to the zero knowledge artifacts we downloaded in the previous steps.

Poll​

Configures the poll duration in seconds, determines whether quadratic voting is enabled, and sets the public key of the Coordinator.

Deploy MACI Contracts​

To deploy the MACI contracts to a specific network you can append :network to the deployment commands, e.g. pnpm deploy:sepolia - please refer to the supported networks documentation page to see all available networks.

pnpm deploy:NETWORK

Deploy Poll​

Before deploying a Poll, make sure you have set the coordinator MACI public key to which you own the private key. To deploy your first Poll you can run the following command:

pnpm deploy-poll:NETWORK

Poll Finalization​

As a coordinator, first you need to merge signups and messages (votes). Messages are stored in a queue so when the poll is over, the coordinator needs to create the merkle tree from the queue (AccQueue). This optimization is needed to reduce gas cost for voters. Then the coordinator generates proofs for the message processing, and tally calculations. This allows to publish the poll results on-chain and then everyone can verify the results when the poll is over. You run a merge with:

pnpm merge:[network] --poll [poll-id]

Then you need to generate the proofs with the following command:

pnpm run prove:[network] --poll [poll-id] \
    --coordinator-private-key [coordinator-maci-private-key] \
    --tally-file ../proofs/tally.json \
    --output-dir ../proofs/proofs/ \
    --start-block [block-number]  \
    --blocks-per-batch [number-of-blocks]

Submit On-chain​

Now it's time to submit the poll results on-chain so that everyone can verify the results:

pnpm submitOnChain:[network] --poll [poll-id] \
    --output-dir proofs/ \
    --tally-file proofs/tally.json

Tally​

Once the proofs are generated, and results tallied, the results (Tally) are written to a file. Let's take a look at one:

{
  "maci": "0xd54b47F8e6A1b97F3A84f63c867286272b273b7C",
  "pollId": "0",
  "network": "localhost",
  "chainId": "31337",
  "isQuadratic": true,
  "tallyAddress": "0xD4fbAF1dFe100d07f8Ef73d8c92e93d0Bcf7b45D",
  "newTallyCommitment": "0x2f55cc85f7f141098ba791a9f6a646f8773b9bb4f5852ccc33b5a28e7b0756e5",
  "results": {
    "tally": [
      "9",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0"
    ],
    "salt": "0x2e9cd240b86cf456fa4deced8e7420c45e3c16941d2dcec308f8b6d48264dda3",
    "commitment": "0x296eac2a7289974f23497bebd39e86599d0b7032796fb84dcc1f6bbda38262ca"
  },
  "totalSpentVoiceCredits": {
    "spent": "81",
    "salt": "0x24f57b75c227987727c13d1e83409d70478b42bdc12a4a4df8129c72fbaf5aaf",
    "commitment": "0xb4ebe68b0da828c0b978ddee86ba934b8e215499ac766491f236ad85fd606de"
  },
  "perVOSpentVoiceCredits": {
    "tally": [
      "81",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0",
      "0"
    ],
    "salt": "0x2590434ea2d600f7bd2396ba7fa454ad4c975c29424ee481561d9786538a5e48",
    "commitment": "0x54ec996599886da21c4b07c25d1de544292a8b7c38b79726995c869c9e95db"
  }
}

We observe an array named results, which holds the aggregated votes for each option. Each option corresponds to an index in the array. In the example above, the first option (index 0) received a total of 9 votes, while all other options received no votes

The totalSpentVoiceCredits object contains the total amount of voice credits spent in the poll. This is the sum of all voice credits spent by all voters, and in quadratic voting, is the sum of the squares of all votes.

The perVOSpentVoiceCredits will contain the amount of voice credits spent per vote option. In this case, the first option received 81 voice credits, and every other option received 0 voice credits. This is because there was only one valid vote casted, with a weight of 9. Given the quadratic voting formula, the total amount of voice credits spent is 81.

That should be all for this tutorial, feel free to join our discord for any questions or recommendations, and feel free to read our documentation for more in depth resources.

MACI Platform - an exciting evolution for MACI​

Hey folks, welcome to another update from the MACI team! Today we are excited to officially announce MACI Platform, a comprehensive platform that enables secure voting for all kinds of use cases and communities.

MACI Platform began as a fork of easy-retro-rpgf with the MACI protocol integrated. We called it “MACI-RPGF”, and it provided a base product that could run retroactive public goods funding with privacy and anti-collusion properties.

Moving forward, the plan is to add even more features over time to fulfill a vision of the ultimate platform for super secure voting and funding that communities can easily deploy.

Overview​

The platform is composed of three components:

• A web interface for both voters and round organizers to interact with the contracts.
• The MACI Platform smart contracts, an extended set of the MACI smart contracts that include registries for projects and fund disbursement features.
• The Coordinator service allows for the complete automation of MACI.

MACI Platform Audience​

MACI Platform is designed for a wide range of use cases: public goods funding, hackathon judging, grant making, community governance, and even state elections, to name a few. At its core, the product consists of three types of users: the Round Operator (the host of a voting round), the Applicant (those wishing to submit an application for inclusion in the round), and a subset of members that are allowed to participate in that voting round, or the Voters.

Having worked with the MACI protocol for years, we understand the ins-and-outs of its implementation and usage, and believe it is a powerful tool for creating a more democratic approach to building consensus within groups of people. However, we also understand that the user experience of MACI in its current implementation is far from accessible to many people. For this reason, MACI Platform is being built to be as easy and intuitive as possible for anyone to use.

The Vision​

The vision for MACI Platform is to provide a clean and simple interface for communities to run different types of secure, anti-collusion voting and funding rounds.

While the current implementation of the platform is only built for the public goods funding use case, there are plans to focus on governance and local elections in the coming year.

From the operator’s perspective, our goal is to allow the creation of a round in less than 10 minutes. This includes setting up MACI contracts and creating a voting or funding round. All the information required to customize the round will be input through the frontend, and by passing it to the backend (the MACI coordinator service), all the necessary contracts will be deployed.

Projects applying to be part of a round can submit the required information via a form, which will be customizable by the round operator to include all required and relevant information for that specific round. Approvals of those projects will be at the discretion of the operators.

Finally, users/voters will be able to access the voting rounds only if they pass the gatekeeping requirements. Currently, it is possible to gate voting rounds using different strategies:

• allowing anyone to participate
• accepting only users with a certain EAS attestation
• accepting only users part of a Semaphore group
• accepting only users with a certain Hat
• accepting only users with a certain Zupass credential

...and many more to come. Please refer to MACI’s gatekeeper page

Roadmap​

What have we built so far? As of now, we have just released a version 1. This release focuses on voter and applicant project experience, enabling them to interact smoothly with the platform by signing up, submitting applications, and voting. Finally, users can also see results once the votes have been tallied by the coordinator.

V2 on the other hand, will focus on the round organizer experience. At a high level, the core devs are focusing on implementing the following features:

• Dashboard for contract deployment and round configuration
• Allowing multiple rounds to live within one MACI Platform instance
• Payout disbursement via the interface by either the voters, applicants, or operators
• Full integration with MACI’s coordinator service to allow finalization of rounds within the interface
• Continued integration with different gatekeepers like Gitcoin Passport

Furthermore, we plan to experiment with AA (account abstraction) to enable smooth experiences for both users and organisers. For users, we have implemented an end-to-end flow using an embedded wallet and paymaster as part of PSE’s internal hackathon, as well as for the Devcon round. For organizers we will be using a smart account and session keys to safely interact with the coordinator service and interact with MACI contracts.

Ecosystem Harmony​

Projects like Gitcoin, Dorahacks, Snapshot, Devfolio, and Jokerace all seem to offer very similar voting, polling, and quadratic funding solutions. So what makes MACI different?

At MACI, our goal isn’t to compete, but to help push the ecosystem toward using safer, more private, and collusion-resistant voting mechanisms. We're actively working with many of the above projects to integrate the MACI protocol, ensuring that the benefits of secure voting can be used where they’re needed most. MACI Platform presents itself as just one more quadratic funding platform for communities to choose from.

It's important to note that while the anti-collusion properties of MACI provide higher security guarantees, they do come with tradeoffs— particularly in terms of user experience (UX), cost, and simplicity. The MACI team is continuously working to address these tradeoffs, but for certain use cases, these tradeoffs may not be worthwhile. For example, the encryption of votes at the end of a round may not actually be desirable or aligned with the spirit or values of any specific community. MACI Platform aims to provide privacy solutions where they’re needed the most, and to augment and support existing voting platforms.

How to get involved​

If you are a community event organizer and want to run a voting or funding round using MACI Platform, please reach out to us using this form. If you are a developer and want to contribute to the code then head over to our GitHub repo and take a look at the “good first issues” tags, or open a new one that you think it’s beneficial and you would like to work on.

Also, stay tuned for recurring voting rounds on demo.maci.vote and our participation in hackathon as sponsors.

References​

• easy-retro-rpgf
• clr.fund
• maci
• maci-platform
• EAS
• Semaphore
• Hats Protocol
• Zupass

Glad to have you here! It's again that time where we have a few MACI roadmap updates to share.

We’re going to take a moment to look at what we accomplished in Q3, but before we start, we would like to express our gratitude to all our collaborators and contributors to the MACI protocol.

MACI Platform ✅​

This quarter, the team continued to focus on building a comprehensive voting platform with MACI. The platform is now turning into an all-in-one solution for voting, quadratic funding, and RPGF rounds. We made the product much more stable by fixing several bugs, and plan on integrating many more features in the future.

In terms of current features, the platform supports these gating mechanisms:

• Semaphore
• Hats Protocol
• Free for all (ie, anyone can join)
• EAS
• Merkle proof
• Zupass

It now also possible to run quadratic and non quadratic voting rounds, as well as running sequential rounds on the same interface. Soon you will also be able to run multiple concurrent rounds.

With the MACI Platform, we were able to support three community rounds, EthMexico, EthTegucigalpa, and Cryptoversidad. All rounds completed successfully with nearly $30,000.00 distributed to several projects and individuals across the three communities. We also received a lot of great feedback that helped improve the platform overall. We couldn’t be happier to work with such wonderful collaborators and help them make a real world impact.

As always, if you're interested in running a round for your community, please get in touch

Coordinator Service ✅​

The Coordinator Service is the ultimate automation of MACI’s main pain-points. It now includes three new features for the frontend interface to provide a very neat experience to MACI operators.

Because we prioritise robust security features whenever possible, the service does not hold any wallet seed phrase to communicate with the various chains. Instead, we implemented a flow that uses ephemeral session keys for short lived approvals, greatly decreasing the impact of a key compromise. This is all possible thanks to account abstraction features such as session keys.

With the flow described above, we implemented a deployer service to easily deploy all needed MACI contracts, as well as an endpoint to merge the MACI state and message trees, an important step required to be able to tally the results.

Account Abstraction Exploration ✅​

Together with a fellow PSE team developer, John, the MACI team is working on a fork of the MACI platform that implements account abstraction features, such as smart wallets and paymasters.

This fork was used in PSE’s first internal hackathon, and allows PSE and EF team members to vote on their favourite hackathon project without spending a single cent from their wallet onchain.

This was a successful experiment that will prove fundamental in our future efforts to improve the MACI platform and make it even more accessible to a general “non crypto native” user base.

Stay tuned for a case study of this experiment!

MACI Protocol Improvements ✅​

The 3327 team successfully completed their Anonymous Poll Joining grant. This work enabled unconditional voter privacy, further strengthening user privacy in the protocol. For more details, please refer to their blog post.

With regard to implementing Vitalik’s latest MACI proposal Mostly Offchain Happy Path, we have not been able to start due to other priorities, however we have defined the tasks required and unblocked the epic by implementing the session keys flow on the coordinator service, so that it can be re-used for a secure relayer service.

In terms of developer experience, we always try to make it easier to onboard new developers to the protocol. As a result, we have been making improvements to the deployment tasks, documentation and smart contracts code. Now developers can more easily override deployment steps to integrate MACI's smart contracts into their own projects; and can extend smart contract functions to support custom logic.

Finally, our internal team has also been brainstorming features and improvements for MACI v3, however no plan is set in stone yet. Stay tuned for more.

We are pleased to announce the release of MACI v2.0.0!

This is our second big release of the year, after the MACI v1.2 release in February of this year. MACI v2.0 brings a more secure and efficient protocol, with improved developer experience, and clearer documentation for users looking to learn about and use MACI.

Background​

MACI - Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure - is an application that provides privacy and collusion resistance for on-chain voting. If you're new to MACI, we first recommend reading our documentation for background information and technical details.

New Features and improvements​

More compact codebase​

We have removed some features that were never used in production, namely Topup and Subsidy. This allowed us to reduce the codebase size, making it cheaper to deploy, as well as reducing the complexity of the zk-SNARK circuits.

We highly thank Chao for his work on these two features over the past years, and look forward to integrating similar features in the future as we come up with new use cases and performance improvements.

On top of that, the merkle tree-like structure holding the signups has been swapped out for a more efficient incremental merkle tree (LazyIMT). This offers some savings for users signing up, as well as simplifies the steps required to finalise a poll, by merging all leaves together and removing the need to compute the subroots and root of the tree.

Improved contract tasks​

It is now possible to deploy contracts and finalise polls using the contracts tasks only. This makes the protocol much easier to use, as there is no need to use the maci-cli anymore, which often came with a large number of flags and options. You will just need to fill a json file with the correct parameters and run few simple commands.

Concurrent Polls​

It is now finally possible to run multiple polls concurrently from a single MACI instance. Users will no longer need to signup again to vote on proposals published by a single organiser. One thing to note is that each poll will have the same amount of voting power, and new users will need to pass the same gating process as existing users.

We believe this feature will work best when used for coordinating several polls for the participants of a single event where signup is gated by the conference ticket and there are multiple voting rounds, like at Devcon or Devconnect.

New Gatekeepers​

Custom Gatekeepers are a great way to guard MACI against Sybil attacks, and with this release we have integrated a number of new protocols, together with the help of our community:

• Hats Protocol
• Gitcoin Passport
• Zupass
• Semaphore

For instance, with Gitcoin Passport as the gatekeeper, the MACI round organiser can set a threshold score and only allow new users with a passport score greater or equal to that threshold. Additionally, with Zupass, we can now gate access to holders of specific event tickets.

We expect to continue to expand our gatekeeper capabilities and welcome the community to come up with new and innovative ways to grant access to MACI's rounds, helping make MACI more customizable and sybil-resilient.

Documentation​

You gave us the feedback that the MACI documentation was way too tough to digest, and we heard you! To make it easier to understand, we have grouped documentation entries under a more logical structure, with different sections for different audiences and objectives.

We continue to use our docs website as the definitive resource for all information related to MACI, including blog releases, documentation updates, and roadmap progress. As always, we welcome suggestions on how to make it better and encourage you to report any inconsistencies you may find.

Security Audit​

As usual before a major release, the protocol has been thoroughly audited by PSE's internal Audit team, and this time no significant issues were found. However, thanks to the auditors' hard work, we have been able to further optimise the protocol and clean up our technical documentation.

For more details on this recent audit, please refer to our audit docs or view the full report.

With more and more eyes on the protocol, we feel more and more confident about MACI's security posture.

Trusted Setup Ceremony​

We are preparing for a new ceremony to cover the changes in our v2.0.0 circuits. To accomplish this, we'll leverage the tooling of p0tion, which helps to streamline and automate Groth16 phase2 ceremonies.

We'll update this page after the ceremony completes to include the production-ready zkey artifacts. In the meantime, the artifacts for v.1.2 can be found on our website, and the artifacts can still be used in production for releases 1.2.0 up to 1.2.5.

Get Involved​

MACI is deeply committed to our community, through our open initiatives like public roadmaps, transparent repository management, and a public Discord channel for interaction with our team.

With every issue, PR, feature and roadmap iteration, we welcome feedback to ensure that the continued development of MACI reflects your and the community's needs. Keep an eye on our documentation, GitHub discussions and our official Twitter/X account for updates.

For those looking to contribute directly, report bugs, or offer feedback, our GitHub repository is open for issues and discussions. We're eager to assist with your projects or contributions.

For practical implementation insights, review our docs as well as the clr.fund, Allo Stack with MACI, and maci-platform repositories as reference implementations. The first two integrations are quadratic funding implementations, a mechanism which otherwise is highly susceptible to collusion and bribery.

For any other questions or feedback, please reach out to us via PSE's Discord, in our #🗳️-maci channel. We're excited to connect and collaborate with you!

References​

• MACI GitHub repository
• MACI documentation
• A technical introduction to MACI 1.0 - Kyle Charbonnet
• Minimal anti-collusion infrastructure - Vitalik
• PSE Discord server
• Allo Stack with MACI
• maci-platform
• clr.fund

Release​

Here's the link to the new release code in GitHub: v2.0.0 Release.

Greetings anon,

We’re excited to share with you what we're building over the next few months. You'll see some of the same themes as our Q2 roadmap as we strive to make MACI and MACI-RPGF more user-friendly and accessible.

If you haven’t read the Q2 in review yet to learn what we’ve been up to the last three months you can check that out here.

MACI Platform​

The team is doubling down efforts to build a comprehensive voting platform with MACI powering it all. Initially called maci-rpgf, the project is soon turning into an all-in-one solution for hosting voting, quadratic funding, and rpgf rounds. We plan to work on improving the product with the following high-level initiatives:

• Complete the integration of the PSE's design team’s new design
• Bootstrap an e2e testing framework to ensure the code is more robust and reliable
• Support quadratic voting
• Support the use of different signup mechanisms
• Move application's data storage from Vercel to IPFS
• Support contributing/voting to multiple rounds on the same deployment

Our efforts will include supporting community organisers who want to fork and operate MACI Platform rounds in production. If you're interested in running a round for your community, please get in touch!

Coordinator Service​

After successfully implementing a proof generation service as part of our effort of reducing the burden on round organisers, we have plans to continue automating all MACI related operations. This includes contract deployment, proof generation and submission, contract details storage, automatic upload of final tally results to IPFS and more.

We see the “Coordinator Service” as the ultimate automation of MACI’s main pain-points, and look forward to building a secure and efficient service that will abstract away all the operational burdens of using MACI. For more information on the full feature list that this service will include, please refer to this GitHub issue.

Explore Account Abstraction​

It is clear that mass adoption of blockchain applications will be difficult if users, especially first time users, must pay to interact with dapps. Furthermore, having a crypto wallet installed and configured to work on a specific chain might also not be straightforward for an average user.

To support this thesis, the MACI team will start a collaboration with other PSE teams involved in researching and implementing account abstraction (AA) solutions. We look forward to bringing some proof of concepts (PoC) for MACI Paymasters and more, which will help remove friction when it comes to web3 UX.

MACI Protocol Improvements​

As always, we plan to improve the MACI protocol both in terms of making it cheaper and easier to use, as well as making it more secure.

As part of this effort, we are currently working with the 3327 team to integrate their Anonymous Poll Joining grant work into a new MACI version. The effort can be tracked in this public GitHub board. This work enables unconditional voter privacy, further strengthening user privacy in the protocol. For more details, please refer to this blog post.

On top of this, the team will begin the ground work to implement Vitalik’s latest MACI proposal Mostly Offchain Happy Path - in a nutshell, the proposal seeks to completely remove transaction costs for users by moving certain operations offchain. For maximum privacy and trustlessness, voters will still be able to go directly on-chain and submit their own signup/vote actions.

How does that sound?​

Questions? Concerns? Ideas? We’d love to hear from you!

If there is a feature you think we should work on, or an initiative you'd like to collaborate with us on, please let us know! We welcome input from anyone in the community. The best ways to get in touch are to hop in our Discord (#🗳️-maci channel), tag us on X, or create an issue on GitHub.

Onward and upward 🚀

Greetings anon,

Glad to have you here! It's that time of the year where we have a few MACI roadmap updates to share. We’re going to take a moment to look at what we accomplished in Q2, as the most active project in the entire PSE GitHub org.

Before we start, we would like to express our gratitude to all our collaborators and contributors to the MACI protocol.

Q2 in review​

In our q2 roadmap, we aimed at a few major Q2 goals that all tied together:

✅ MACI-RPGF​

A lot has happened with MACI-RPGF this last quarter. Much time has been spent improving the product in order to provide a more functional and stable product with a better overall user experience.

PSE's design team came up with a beautiful design that will soon be merged into the stable version of the code. We are looking forward to implementing this major update and are excited for you to try it!

On the outreach and support side, we also engaged with several communities to run a round using MACI-RPGF. There are three rounds ongoing with EthMexico, ETH Tegucigalpa and Cryptoversidad. Our developers have been working closely with their development teams to deploy and run MACI-RPGF. We look forward to supporting them throughout their rounds and helping facilitate the distribution of funds directly into community members building amazing things in the Ethereum ecosystem.

✅ MACI Coordinator Service​

The use of a Coordinator Service would greatly simplify the operation requirements when running MACI. To better support communities running MACI polls, whether as a QF round or a simple voting application, the team has prioritised the development of a Coordinator Service that can be used by any Round Operator.

In the last three months we successfully completed the first iteration of a proof generation service, which can be used to more easily finalise MACI polls. Additionally, work on a frontend dashboard has started. This dashboard can be used to more easily deploy contracts in a customisable way via an intuitive user interface.

✅ MACI Core Protocol Improvements​

To achieve our Q2 goal of “Unconditional Privacy" we worked with the 3327 team (responsible for the ElGamal on MACI implementation) to come up with an effective solution and a better user experience that we could have hoped for. More on this can be found in our blog, but we have now started this grant work and are looking forward to seeing this in action in the coming months.

We have also been busy working on some new features and improvements to the codebase. It is now easier than ever to deploy MACI instances, as well as re-use certain smart contracts that have already been deployed and will not need changing.

Furthermore, we have managed to slightly reduce the costs for users by removing unused features, as well as using different and more optimised data structures. This brought several improvements, such as allowing for concurrent polls to be run from one MACI instance (finally!).

Finally, we worked with the community to integrate a number of different gatekeepers:

• Semaphore
• Gitcoin Passport
• Zupass - thanks gasperpre for the implementation

You can now use these (plus more) to gatekeep signups to MACI and shoot down those sybil attacks!!.

Stay tuned for an upcoming MACI release where all these efforts can be seen in action.

✅ Support Gitcoin Allo protocol integration​

Throughout May and June, Gitcoin and Nick Lionis in particular worked hard to integrate MACI in the Allo Stack. You can find the code on their GitHub. The stack will soon be used in production by Gitcoin to support running grant rounds privately.

We are excited to see rounds being run with this integration, and look forward to continue to collaborate with the Allo team to improve MACI and integrate new versions into their stack.

✅ Support ETHDam hackathon QV round​

In April, we successfully supported the ETHDam team to run a private quadratic voting (QV) round for the ETHDam hackathon, powered by MACI. Conference attendees used clr.fund to vote on their favourite hackathon projects in order to allocate $10,000 to projects building novel privacy and security solutions in the ecosystem.

✅ MACI starter kit​

We've teamed up with Buidl Guild and the Scaffold-ETH team to build a MACI starter kit: a web app that integrates MACI in order to run polls. Thanks to Yash's efforts we now have a ready-to-use MACI starter kit. This has already been used in two hackathons (as an example here's an Eth Berlin project) to quickly prototype projects using MACI. We thank Yash for all his effort with this and are looking forward to see what the community will build with it.

That was a lot, and there’s more to come! Be sure to keep an eye out here for our next post where we look forward to what is coming for MACI in Q3, 2024.

Minimal Anti Collusion Infrastructure (MACI) is a public good that allows one to run secure, private, on-chain voting polls.

Given MACI's open source nature, it's common for our core team to develop new features or to fix issues based on community feedback. However, it's been less common for external contributors to make significant changes to the core protocol.

Well, this soon will be a reality thanks to a MACI improvement proposal sent by the 3327 team. 3327 is collective of 10+ people working on improving blockchain technologies, with a focus on research and engineering. Their engineering team previously worked on implementing the ElGamal flow into MACI (here's a nice presentation on it from Marija Mikić at EthCC [6]). The work described in this post aims to be its direct replacement due to its simplified nature and several additional benefits.

This proposal can be divided into two parts:

1. bring unconditional privacy to MACI's voters
2. optimise inefficient merkle tree structure holding messages, by replacing it with a hash chain

1) Enable unconditional voter privacy​

Currently with MACI, if a voter performs a key change, the voter's new key would not be anonymous to the coordinator. The coordinator could collude with a bad actor to inform the latter of the key change, as the coordinator would have access to all decrypted messages.

The key focus of this improvement is to enable users to be completely anonymous by removing the link between the original signup key and the key used for voting. How would this work? Well, users sign up to vote via the MACI contract, and depending on the gatekeeper in use, they'd have to prove that they've passed the entry condition. Now, given knowledge of this key, they can signup with a new key to polls deployed by this same MACI contract.

Thus, voters can prove anonymously that they know the preimage of a StateLeaf, by passing this information to a zk-SNARK circuit, and validating this proof within the poll contract when joining with the new key. You might be thinking that everyone knows the preimage of a state leaf, as it's public information that can be taken from the contracts' logs. However, the circuit will not accept the public key directly but would instead take the private key and use it to generate the public key. This way, only users with knowledge of a specific private key can generate a valid inclusion proof.

Now after signing up to the Poll with this new key, there will not be any link to the original key, and users will effectively be anonymous. Of course users should ensure that they are using different wallets where possible.

Finally, with the use of a nullifier, it will not be possible for the same original key to be used to signup more than once for each new poll.

Are there any drawbacks? Well, yes. There will be an extra step for users to register to individual Polls. We aim to offset this cost and additional step soon either with gasless transactions or by moving some logic off-chain.

2) Message structure optimisation​

On top of the improvements to anonymity, the 3327 team aims to also replace the Merkle tree used for storing messages with a hash chain. Some of the benefits of this approach are:

• unlimited number of messages
• removal of expensive merge operations from the coordinator
• cheaper to send messages as only one hash is required to update the hash chain
• less constraints on the circuits due to simplified logic

Unlimited messages

Merkle trees are usually bound by a depth property. Together with the number of leaves per node, we can calculate the max capacity of a tree. For instance, for a binary tree with a depth of 10, we can host up to 2^10 (1024) leaves. On the other hand, hash chains do not have a limit, unless if we wanted to set one, so we technically can support an unlimited number of messages.

Cheaper operations

Hashing the previous hash chain with the message is cheaper than inserting into a Merkle tree. Additionally, removing the need for the coordinator to perform merge operations on the accumulator queues that were used on chain will greatly reduce costs and processing time.

Smaller circuits

As cited in their proposal, processing message inclusion proofs for k messages in a tree with height h requires k * h hashing operations within the circuit with 2 * k * h signal values for inclusion proofs. Processing messages with chain hashes removes the unnecessary inclusion proofs and requires only k hashes to be computed for k messages without any extra signals, as the requirement is to prove that the order and inclusion of all messages are correct.

A call for MACI grant proposals​

So what does this mean for you, Anon?

As an open-source project of PSE with support from the Ethereum Foundation, MACI is fortunate to have the resources to invest in the maintenance and improvement of the protocol. This means we're able to fund full-time developers as well as allocate grants for various research and development initiatives.

We encourage all community members to contribute to the improvement and ongoing development of MACI! After all, our goal is to build the most secure e-voting system, and this cannot be accomplished without all of your support.

As a team, we are incredibly excited about this proposal and will continue to work hard to help the 3327 team get this upgrade production-ready over the next 3 months.

To contribute to MACI, submit issues, or learn more about it, you can reach out to us either via Discord or GitHub issues.

If you have an ambitious idea you'd like to work on, reach out to us and we could create a proposal to build together! If you don't yet have a specific idea but are still keen to work on MACI, we have some research ideas which might inspire you and we could collaborate on a grant together. Feel free to explore these ideas below and get in touch:

• MACI coordinator in a TEE
• Group wise matching
• Folding schemes for MACI's circuits

References​

• 3327 team
• 3327 ElGamal flow
• 3327 ElGamal API
• Marija Mikić - Anonymity in MACI - EthCC [6]
• MACI Original idea
• MACI Anonymization

Greetings anon,

Glad to have you here! We have a few MACI roadmap updates to share.

Before we hop into our Q2 plans, let's take a look at what we did in Q1:

Q1 in review​

In our kickoff of 2024, we aimed at a few major Q1 goals that all tied together:

✅ Release MACI v1.2​

We completed a significant refactor to simplify the codebase and improve developer experience. After an internal audit and revamped documentation, we released a new MACI version - see our MACI v1.2 release post to read up on the details of that upgrade.

✅ Support clr.fund upgrade​

clr.fund, a quadratic funding (QF) project which has distributed millions of dollars to Ethereum public goods, is the longest-running production application built on MACI (since 2020!). Thanks primarily to the hard work of their core dev yuetloo, clr.fund successfully upgraded from MACI 0.x to our fresh v1.2 release. Nicely done!

✅ Support ETH Latam QF round​

We teamed up with ETH Latam to help them run a QF round using the clr.fund stack (running on MACI v1.2). Over 60 conference attendees participated (using Zupass tickets as the gatekeeper to the faucet and round) to distribute over 30,000 DAI to public good projects across Central America and the Caribbean - view the round results and learn more in ETH Kipu's ETH Latam recap post!

✅ Support ETH Colombia QF round​

The ETH Colombia team ran a QF round for their community - view the round results here.

✅ Community engagement via events​

We participated in our first hackathons (ETHGlobal Circuit Breaker, ETHGlobal London, ETH Latam, ETHTaipei and ETHDam) and distributed over $10,000 in bounties. We had a blast engaging with hackers from around the world, receiving feedback, and seeing innovative project ideas on MACI come to life. Thank you to all those who participated!

Q2 Roadmap​

Now let's look at what we're excited to build over the next few months:

🎯 MACI-RPGF​

Retroactive Public Goods Funding (RPGF) has been building momentum over the past few years and really took the crypto space by storm after Optimism's recent round of 30 million OP.

In February we proposed MACI as a solution for Optimism's RPGF tech stack, thanks to MACI's strong guarantees of correct execution, censorship resistance, privacy, and collusion resistance. Since releasing a demo of our full-stack MACI-RPGF implementation in March, we've received positive feedback and interest from various communities in running RPGF rounds on MACI.

This quarter we're excited to keep building out MACI-RPGF with additional functionality and improved UX. Our efforts will include supporting community organizers who want to fork and operate MACI-RPGF rounds in production. If you're interested in running a round for your community, please get in touch!

🎯 MACI Coordinator Service​

From years of supporting QF rounds on MACI we've learned a lot about the pain-points of community organizers. The blunt truth is that many technical barriers still exist - in order to operate a MACI poll (whether in a QF round or a simple voting application), you essentially must be a developer to deploy the smart contracts, execute on-chain transactions, and run tooling to generate zero-knowledge proofs to guarantee the integrity of a MACI poll. This is no trivial feat, and as a result, MACI is simply not a viable option for many communities to use today.

We're aiming to change this by building a "Coordinator Service" to simplify the role of the coordinator, automate tasks, and remove technical barriers to running MACI-RPGF (and all MACI) rounds. This will include a web interface to deploy and operate MACI instances as well as a server to generate proofs and submit them on-chain. We're confident this tooling will accelerate community adoption by offloading the technical overhead and domain knowledge currently required to use this technology stack. More details to come on this soon!

🎯 MACI Core Protocol Improvements​

After our thorough refactor of MACI's code, which led to the release of v1.2, we're now in position to add new features and improvements to the core protocol. As always, we are open to suggestions from the community, so please let us know what ideas and feature requests you have!

Currently, we have a couple of focus areas:

Unconditional Privacy

As of now, MACI's coordinator can track user key changes, which allows them to associate voters with their respective votes, and thus potentially collude with bribers to deanonymize users. We're investigating ways to prevent this possibility. The 3227 team implemented a proof of concept using El-Gamal to remove the link between a new MACI key and their original key. Furthermore, there is a proposal under discussion on how to implement anonymous poll signups, which would provide the same benefits of the El-Gamal protocol, though with a much better user experience.

Deployment Improvements

MACI's deployment process can certainly be made easier and more efficient. We will explore ways to improve this, for instance making it cheaper to deploy MACI by implementing patterns to only deploy contracts once if they can be reused across MACI instances. We aim to make it more user-friendly as well by providing a better interface to deploy MACI instances.

🎯 Support Gitcoin Allo protocol integration​

In our initial 2024 roadmap we outlined our plans to engage more with the broader Ethereum ecosystem in order to validate the value of MACI by exploring integrations and gathering input from community developers. Gitcoin is a great example: we've been in discussions with them to explore a MACI integration into their Allo protocol - the smart contracts that power Gitcoin Grants Stack - in order to increase user privacy and bribery resistance in their public good funding infrastructure.

We're already in the process of supporting this integration, thanks to Nick Lionis and Tse Lao and their ETHDam hackathon project. We're excited to see this integration come to life in production and to support Gitcoin in their efforts to improve public goods funding on Ethereum!

🎯 Support ETHDam hackathon QV round​

Given the privacy focus of ETHDam, we're excited to support a private quadratic voting (QV) round for the hackathon, powered by MACI. Conference attendees will use clr.fund to vote on their favorite hackathon projects in order to allocate $10,000 to hackathon projects building novel privacy and security solutions in the ecosystem. The round is live at ethdamqf.com, so stay tuned for results!

🎯 MACI starter kit​

We're teaming up with Buidl Guild and the Scaffold-ETH team to build a MACI starter kit: a web app that integrates MACI in order to run polls. We expect this to be a useful template for any developer prototyping on MACI or just looking for a simple reference implementation. Whether you're a dev that prefers reading through code vs. documentation, or you're a builder who merely wants to understand how the MACI user flow works, we hope this will be a great resource for you!

How does that sound?​

Questions? Concerns? Ideas? We’d love to hear from you!

If there is a feature you think we should work on, or an initiative you'd like to collaborate with us on, please let us know! We welcome input from anyone in the community. The best ways to get in touch are to hop in our Discord (#🗳️-maci channel), tag us on X or create an issue on GitHub.

Onward and upward 🚀

Greetings anons,

Happy 2024 and welcome to the new MACI documentation website and blog! Moving forward, we’ll post our latest project news and development updates here.

We have a few exciting announcements to share, but first, a quick review:

Overview of MACI​

WTF is MACI?​

Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure (MACI) is an on-chain voting system which protects privacy and minimizes the risk of collusion and bribery.

MACI is a set of smart contracts and zero-knowledge circuits upon which developers can build applications, such as voting applications or quadratic funding platforms. It was originally proposed by Vitalik Buterin in 2019, then implemented and maintained by community members with support from the Ethereum Foundation. It's now actively maintained within Privacy & Scaling Explorations (PSE).

Using MACI, voting is private, yet voting results are public. On-chain votes are encrypted, and no voter can prove how they voted, but final results are published publicly and verified on-chain with cryptographic proofs to prevent censorship, bribery, collusion, fraud, and other nefarious acts common in public polling processes.

To understand the promise of on-chain voting, start with Vitalik's post on blockchain voting. For a general overview, brief history, and context on the importance of MACI, check out the Release Announcement: MACI 1.0 by Wei Jie, one of the creators. He also created a helpful overview of MACI video. Kyle Charbonnet wrote a great Technical Introduction to MACI 1.0 that provides a walkthrough on how MACI operates. I also recently presented an introduction to MACI at Devconnect 2023.

MACI Vision​

MACI is a public good that is quickly becoming a core piece of infrastructure for Ethereum-based applications to support on-chain voting while protecting user privacy.

Our MACI team’s vision is to build the most secure e-voting solution in the world.

Let's hop in to our updates to see how we plan to execute on this bold vision.

Project updates​

New year, new team, new roadmap!

1) New team​

Over the past few months we've undergone a lot of changes within MACI's core team. I'd like to take this chance to introduce and welcome our new core members!

MACI is now maintained and will be continuously be improved by our core team, which consists of:

• ctrlc03
• Sam Richards
• 0xmad
• kittybest
• crisgarner
• aguzmant103
• Vee

Now is a great time to mention that we stand on the shoulders of giants. Many gigabrains have made heroic advancements in this project - a big "thank you" to all those who have contributed to date! There are too many people to list here, but calling out a few notable players:

• Vitalik, Barry, Wei Jei for the original idea, architecture, initial implementation, and ongoing guidance
• Recent team members that helped launched our v1.1.1 release and have since moved on: Q, Jei, Chao, and Daehyun

We're excited to carry the baton forward to bring the vision of MACI to reality!

2) New roadmap​

As a team building in the open source space, we're taking a concerted effort to make our work more accessible and to foster more collaboration and feedback from our community. As part of this work, we're making our core team's roadmap public and will continue to do so.

Read our full 2024 roadmap here.

TL;DR: We'll be focusing most of our time on:

1. Developer experience (documentation, tooling, refactoring) so that MACI is easier for projects to integrate and use
2. Community engagement (integration support, hackathon bounties, conference presentations) to more quickly iterate and improve based off feedback
3. Quadratic Funding Experiments to advance real-world adoption of this technology

We're happy to share that these efforts are already underway. We expect to release a new and improved version of MACI within the next month. We're exploring MACI integrations and are in discussions with projects including Gitcoin Grants Stack and Optimism RetroPFG on how MACI could provide collusion resistance to those systems. Major shoutout to clr.fund (who became the first production project to integrate MACI back in 2020)! We're actively working with clr.fund to help them upgrade their stack to the latest version of MACI. Expect to see announcements of upcoming MACI-enabled quadratic funding rounds soon!

3) New documentation​

MACI now has a fresh new website, with revamped documentation!

We immediately recognized the need for improved educational content about MACI, as it's a complex project with several core components (ZK circuits, Ethereum smart contracts, TypeScript libraries). Whether you're a developer looking to integrate MACI into your application, an open-source developer interested in contributing, or a product manager seeking to understand the high-level mechanics of MACI, we want to hear from you in order to continuously improve your onboarding experience.

Please take a look and let us know what you think.

4) New community access​

Whether you're interested in contributing to MACI or looking to stay up-to-date on the latest happenings, it's now much easier to stay connected with us and the community. Here are some ways you can keep in touch:

• GitHub: open an issue or PR or join our discussions
• Discord: join the PSE server and hop in the #🗳️-maci channel to chat with our core team
• Twitter/X: follow our new handle @zkMACI for updates or to hit us up with feedback
• This website: we'll continue to post updates here (at least 1 blog post every quarter, we promise 🤞)!

Expect to see announcements around new MACI releases, integrations, event participation (quadratic funding rounds, conferences, hackathons), and grant RFPs.

We look forward to collaborating closely with our open source community this year!

How does that sound?​

Questions? Concerns? Ideas? We’d love to hear from you!

If there is a feature you think we should work on, or an initiative you'd like to collaborate with us on, please let us know! We welcome input from anyone in the community.

Onward and upward 🚀