IOHK | Cardano whiteboard; Treasuries, with Bingsheng Zhang, Ph.D. Lecturer
Channel: Input Output
Date: 21/12/2017

See the paper here: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/zhangb2/treasury.pdf

Treasury systems will be a fundamental building block of third generation cryptocurrencies. Through this mechanism, communities will be able to have their say in how the protocols that they use are developed and maintained. 

Treasury systems are an important development that allow a blockchain community to govern and make decisions in a collaborative way, and something that will ensure the sustainability of decentralised networks. 

In the research paper, Bingsheng Zhang, an expert in voting systems, and others provide a rigorous security analysis of a treasury system, the first time this has been done. Bingsheng and his colleagues have modelled and implemented a provably secure treasury system that is suitable for most existing blockchains, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and others. The treasury proposed also supports liquid democracy and delegative voting. 

Abstract. A Treasury System for Cryptocurrencies: Enabling Better Collaborative Intelligence? Bingsheng Zhang, Roman Oliynykov , Hamed Balogun, and Tamara Finogina, Lancaster University, UK 

A treasury system is a community controlled and decentralized collaborative decision-making mechanism for sustainable funding of the underlying blockchain development and maintenance. During each treasury period, project proposals are submitted, discussed, and voted for; top-ranked projects are funded from the treasury. The Dash governance system is a real-world example of such kind of systems. 

In this work, we, for the first time, provide a rigorous study of the security of the treasury system. We modelled, designed, and implemented a provably secure treasury system that is compatible with most existing blockchain infrastructures, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. More specifically, the proposed treasury system supports liquid democracy/delegative voting for better collaborative intelligence. Namely, the voters can either vote directly on the proposed projects or delegate their votes to experts. Its core component is a universally composable secure end-to-end verifiable online voting protocol. The integrity of the treasury voting decisions is guaranteed even when all the voting committee members are corrupted. 

To further improve efficiency, we proposed the world’s first honest verifier zero-knowledge proof for unit vector encryption with logarithmic size communication. This partial result may be of independent interest to other cryptographic protocols. A pilot system is implemented under Java/Scala, and its benchmark results indicate that the proposed system can support tens of thousands of treasury participants with high efficiency.

Bingsheng Zhang, Ph.D. Lecturer (Assistant Professor) Program Director of MSc. Cyber Security, Security Lancaster School of Computing and Communications. Lancaster University, UK. Mr Zhang's research focus is in the areas of IoT security and cryptography. In particular, I am interested in the following subjects:

  • E-voting Security

  • Blockchain Security

  • Privacy Preserving Data Mining

See more publications here: http://dblp.uni-trier.de/pers/hd/z/Zhang:Bingsheng.html

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