The central securities depository in Russia has announced successful results as it finished the testing of an e-proxy voting system running on a distributed ledger.

The prototype based on the NXT distributed cryptographic platform was developed by NSD together with DSX Technologies. The project's open-source code is available on GitHub.

E-proxy provides for electronic interaction between securities holders and issuers for the purpose of exchanging information and documents. The blockchain-based e-proxy voting prototype brings all the information on voting into a distributed database accessible to all of its members. The database contains the full cryptographically protected history of the activities. Securities holders vote via their personal account using their digital signature.

According to NSD’s Chair of the Executive Board Eddie Astanin, “Russian specialists are among the most experienced in the global FinTech industry, and we have proven this fact by implementing a fully functional prototype of e-proxy voting system based on blockchain.”

Astanin believes that the fintech boom seen in the past decade cannot be ignored by the national finance industry, therefore, “outdated platforms” should not be maintained but rather displaced by innovative ones like blockchain.

“Over the period of four months, we managed to develop a working prototype of the blockchain-based e-proxy voting system that has no analogues in the world. During the testing process, we reached a submission speed of 80 voting instructions per second. We are currently aiming to increase the system's capacity and to enable the support of new voting types. Our next step would be to subject our new prototype to legal and cryptographic expert evaluation, which will give us a more definite idea whether the prototype is suited for real voting,” commented Sergey Putyatinskiy, IT Director at NSD.

The idea of blockchain voting has become quite popular recently, with British company Smartmatic enabling the US Republican party to use blockchain voting system during their Utah primaries in March, and Blockchain Technologies Corp software company announcing the development of its own voting machine back in November 2015.

Maria Rudina