2026-11-06 –, Lotus Stage 2
On-chain governance has made vote buying cheap and practical. This talk explains the threats of coercion and tally leakage in DAO voting, why classical e-voting defenses don't transfer to blockchains, and what recent research (Cast Iron, B-Privacy) tells us about how to fix it.
In 2025, a buyer paid 5 ETH on LobbyFi to control $6.5M worth of ARB votes, and this is one of many incidents. On-chain governance has made vote buying and coercion practical, yet most DAO voting today is fully public; and even where ballots are hidden, privacy is weaker than it looks.
This talk digs into voting privacy: what ballot secrecy, receipt-freeness, and coercion resistance actually mean, why coercion resistance matters for any election with real stakes, and why the classical defenses from the e-voting literature rest on assumptions that fail in remote, blockchain-based settings.
We then turn to a threat unique to token-weighted voting: analyzing thousands of proposals across 30+ DAOs, we find that published tallies alone often reveal how individuals voted, even with secret ballots. This talk draws on two recent research results from the speaker (Cast Iron and B-Privacy, USENIX Security '26), a Cornell PhD researcher.
Dani is a third year PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell University advised by Ari Juels. He study the tension between privacy and transparency in AI, blockchain and governance systems. Currently, he is an Ethereum Foundation Fellow working on Unstoppable Autonomous Agents: autonomous agents that cannot be shut down, equipped with access to cryptocurrency wallets, social media accounts, APIs and other external tools.