Civicpower: Making Blockchain-Based Voting a Reality
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It’s a tale as old as blockchain technology itself – can they be successfully leveraged into an effective and transparent voting network?
Elections have become a focal point of discussion, but unfortunately, one of the main points on each agenda is their legitimacy. Traditional systems are anything but transparent, and many people are left wondering if their votes actually matter.
The lack of accountability and of provable verifiability has turned skeptics out of many, and amidst all this, blockchain-based technologies, through their inherent transparency, have emerged as sort of an alternative.
One project is working hard into making this a reality – the people behind Civicpower have bold ambitions to become the world’s leading blockchain-backed voting app and a one-stop shop where all citizens can have their say, whether as a participant or an organizer of a vote.
What is Civicpower?
Civicpower is a platform built by a team that believes that technology is paramount and imperative to guarantee freedom in a world that’s more and more connected.
They’ve built and brought forward an app that allows people to organize voting in a transparent and open-sourced manner.
The solution itself is available in two separate modes of use:
- The shared public voting cloud app allows anyone to organize a vote at no cost and in just a few minutes. This platform is operated by Civicpower in its sovereign data centers.
- Private voting cloud in either one of Civicpower’s sovereign data centers or in the user’s own data center – a virtual machine that’s entirely secure, encrypted, and can’t be modified during the voting process itself.
The application has a very easy-to-use interface, which is an important consideration when it comes to accessibility.
The exciting thing is that all of the above is available on the open-source Github of the project.
The Cool Features
One of the coolest things about Civicpower is the virtual voting machine, as well as the ability to host them in a secure, sovereign data center that’s designed to be as independent as possible on all technological layers.
The team behind the project has identified three building blocks when it comes to structuring a data center:
- At the hardware level – you can’t afford not to scale it up – the team announces the IP addresses, manage the local networks, the VPS, and the physical security.
- The infrastructure level – the team delivers logical security, mail, DNS, SMS, VM management, and so forth.
- The application-level – the CivicID user base, and the servers of the public voting cloud must be decentralized.
The platform itself is fueled by The Garage, a blockchain-centered incubator based in Paris, France.
The entire voting operation is recorded on the blockchain, which allows for complete verification by all participants. At the same time, the identity of users is kept secret thanks to the CivicID user base.
The results of the vote can be checked as soon as the poll is over, and they cannot be modified.
Here Comes the POWER Token
POWER is the native token of the platform, and they can be used within the ecosystem to pay for all the voting operations and for other services which are either readily available or planned in the roadmap.
The team is also actively working on automatic EVM generation, and one of the main intentions of the ICO funding is to help them move faster in this regard.
It’s worth noting that POWER will be hosted on Ethereum using the ERC-20 token standard. The model is deflationary as each quarter, the team will publicly buy back more than 55% worth of their revenue and burn half of it. Civicpower’s ICO started on May 16th, and it will continue until September 1st, 2021.