Venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, also known as A16z, has released a Solidity library that can be used for anonymous voting on Ethereum. Called “Cicada,” the library prevents an individual voter’s choice from being known before polling ends. When combined with zero-knowledge group membership systems like Semaphore, it can also make the identity of the voter permanently unknowable, according to a May 24 blog post from A16z engineer Michael Zhu.
Cicada relies on time-lock puzzles, a type of cryptography that allows users to encrypt secret values that can only be decrypted after a specific period of time has passed, Zhu stated.