3 posts tagged with "grants"

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