Radium Core, a decentralized cryptocurrency offering a system for record verification and blockchain-based identities has announced the release of Radium SmartChain v3.2. The main new feature included in the update is blockchain voting.

Radium Elections is a blockchain based voting platform designed to restore confidence, transparency, and integrity to the voting process. Using a combination of blockchain technology and asymmetric key pair identity management, Radium voting provides a transparent, integrated, and easily validated voting platform.

All election data and votes are recorded on-chain, allowing for near-time observation, counting, and verification by any third party running the SmartChain application. Radium elections are designed for applications ranging from project management and club votes to political elections and shareholder voting.

The Radium Elections platform will be available to anyone who has registered an identity on the Radium SmartChain. While the development team will be using this platform for Radium blockchain and SmartChain governance, anyone can hold an election, on any topic or for any purpose, at any time.

In a drive to further decentralize and democratize the Radium network, the Radium Core team decided that all major changes to the Radium Core and SmartChain protocols will be voted on using the newly released SmartChain voting functionality. The community will then have a period of time to participate in the vote, and the outcome of the vote will be used to determine whether the proposed change will be implemented in the protocol or not. When possible, new protocol changes will be released as dormant code, that must be activated by a predetermined threshold of approval votes. This way the community will have a direct impact on what is included and active in the Radium SmartChain.

Technical Aspects

A Radium election will consist of a title, description, open and close date/block, and up to 200 candidates.

Each election will be open for voting for the time period between the open and close block number.

Elections can be created so that voting will open in the future, allowing the creator to set up the election in advance.

Real-time voting results can be viewed while voting is in progress and final results will be available immediately after the election closes.

The election results, including individual votes, will remain secured in the Radium Blockchain and visible indefinitely.

Votes are not anonymous and are linked to the SmartChain identity from which they were cast.

Each identity can only vote once, and votes can not be changed after the vote is cast

Upon creation, the election data is compressed and encoded into a hexadecimal smart transaction.

For indexing and lookup purposes, an election ID is generated from a truncated ripemd160 hash of the transaction ID. Ripemd160 was chosen because it creates a correct sized hash so that votes can be cast by a single output start transaction.

When users vote, the aforementioned election ID and the index of the chosen vote is encoded together and sent to the network.

During syncing and operation, the SmartChain maintains a database of elections based on the ID, and parses incoming vote transactions, assigning the votes to the elections based on ID, and incrementing vote counts based on the voting index.

The identity of the voter is determined by a lookup of the public key signing the election/vote SmartTransacition against the SmartChain’s internal database of registered identities.

The Radium team stated: