Multi-chain Governance: On-Chain Voting with Ethereum and Internet Computer

Background

Decentralized voting is a key element of blockchain governance, yet participation in this process on Ethereum is significantly hindered by high gas fees. Alternative solutions like Snapshot have emerged, offering an off-chain voting mechanism to sidestep these fees. However, such solutions introduce considerable challenges, particularly the lack of direct enforceability of votes on the blockchain. This discrepancy can lead to misalignments between governance decisions made off-chain and their actual implementation on-chain.

Scope

This project implements an Ethereum token based, 100% on-chain voting system enabled by leveraging Ethereum and the Internet Computer blockchain. Its key features include:

• Retrieving voting rights from Ethereum (Ethereum Sepolia or ERC-20 based), and integrating them into the multi-chain governance framework.
• Implementing a simple, yet effective, voting application on the Internet Computer, covering frontend and backend.
• Executing the voting process on the ICP blockchain, showcasing the practicability of on-chain voting.
• Triggering actions on Ethereum based on voting outcomes, illustrating a seamless, admin-free integration that ensures that governance decisions are directly reflected on the blockchain.

Notes

This is only a proof of concept and aims for simplicity of code, not security.

The application leverages the RPC canister for ICP-Ethereum communication and incorporates Ethereum login functionality of the Sign In with Ethereum (SIWE) project and its Rust demo.

License

This project is distributed under the MIT License, detailed in the LICENSE file.

Runbook

0. Clone this repo and cd into it: git clone git@github.com:bjoernek/multi_chain_voting.git && cd multi_chain_voting
1. Go to https://sepolia-faucet.pk910.de and start mining some SepoliaETH
2. Install dfx

• If on Windows: Install WSL 2
• Run sh -ci "$(curl -fsSL https://internetcomputer.org/install.sh)" and follow the printed instructions
• Run dfxvm update

3. Deploy the voting app locally

• Start a local ICP node: dfx start --clean --background (you can stop it later with dfx stop)
  • On Windows: If it doesn't work, deploy to mainnet instead (see below for instructions)
• Deploy locally: make deploy-all. You will see a URL to the frontend in the console

4. Claim SepoliaETH from the faucet
5. Try the dapp

• Navigate to the frontend URL displayed in the terminal
• Log in, create a proposal, vote on it. You should have voting power equal to the amount of SepoliaETH you have

6. If you want your backend to write the results to Sepolia

• Send your backend some SepoliaETH. You can find its address with dfx canister call backend get_eth_address
• Call dfx canister call backend execute_proposal '(<proposal id>)'
  • The response contains a TX id you can look up on e.g. Etherscan
• You can also deploy your own contract on Sepolia
  • Suggested deployment tool: https://remix.ethereum.org/
  • Copy/paste solidity/contract.sol into remix
  • Compile
  • Deploy using WalletConnect environment to target Sepolia
  • Note the address of the Sepolia contract
  • Replace pub const TARGET_CONTRACT in src/backend/src/lib.rs with your newly deployed Sepolia contract
  • Redeploy the backend: make deploy-backend

If you want you can also deploy to ICP mainnet.

• If you don't have any cycles (gas) yet, run dfx wallet --network ic redeem-faucet-coupon <code>
• DFX_NETWORK=ic make deploy-all. You will see a URL to the frontend in the console
• The new backend canister will have a different ETH address. Send it some SepoliaETH if you want it to be able to write to Sepolia