EthereumZuri.ch 2024

Multi-chain Governance: On-Chain Voting with Ethereum and Internet Computer
04-05, 15:30–16:30 (Europe/Zurich), Merge Stage

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.

This workshop explores an ERC-20 based, 100% on-chain voting system enabled by leveraging the Internet Computer (IC) blockchain. This innovative multi-chain setup integrates the Ethereum and IC blockchains, presenting a novel approach to blockchain governance. Moreover, the presented set-up is designed to be adaptable for broader applications in multi-chain governance, facilitating decision-making across different blockchain networks.


Participants will be provided with hands-on guidance to navigate this multi-chain governance setup, including:

  • Retrieving ERC-20 voting rights from Ethereum, and integrating them into the multi-chain governance framework.
  • Implementing a simple, yet effective, voting application on the Internet Computer.
  • Executing the voting process on the IC 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.
  • Senior Researcher at DFINITY foundation with focus on tokenomics and governance.
  • Lecturer at the University of Zurich for stress testing of banks

Severin is a Software Engineer at DFINITY on the SDK team. Before that, he worked at Auticon and insurando and got his Masters in Computer Science here at UZH. He likes do do anything where he doesn't have to touch a frontend.