Waves Enterprise has launched Voting — a blockchain-powered e-voting platform centering corporate clients — for public beta testing.
According to the official announcement, published on May 28, the new service aims to “leverage all the advantages of blockchain technology while retaining traditional voting rules and processes”.
Artem Kalikhov, chief product officer of Waves Enterprise, told Cointelegraph that only a decentralized solution can guarantee data protection and transparency in online voting:
“The blockchain provides a trustless environment for data exchange between independent encryption servers that act as participants of voting protocol. Voting results are protected by cryptographic algorithms. Blockchain technology does not allow forging or stealing a vote.”
Voting’s blockchain architecture is reportedly based on the Proof-of-Stake and Proof-of-Authority consensus algorithms, which allegedly allows it to process “up to 1,000 requests per second”.
Kalikhov said that the e-voting platform is relevant for companies that practice shareholder voting, and are interested in confidential internal voting among employees. According to him, Voting is not limited to a specific industry, and can cater to banks, industrial companies, IT-giants, oil and gas corporations, and healthcare institutions.
“I can tell that one Russian oil and gas company is interested in using the electronic voting service for their internal needs,” he added.
The platform will remain free for the duration of public beta testing, which is estimated to last up to two months. The cost of the fully-fledged solution will be individual for each customer, and will take into account the number of nodes in the blockchain network and the amount of encryption servers, among other factors.
Approved by the Russian government
Earlier in April, the Russian Ministry of Communications added Waves Enterprise to the Unified Register of Russian Software for Computers and Databases.
As a Waves Enterprise representative explained to Cointelegraph at the time, in order to make the cut, the company had to prove that their software does not contain any proprietary modules that were developed by or belong to foreign firms, does not include trade secrets, and belongs to a Russian company.