No abstract

Ensuring safe custody of crypto-assets, while at the same time allowing a user to easily access and transfer them, is one of the biggest challenges of this nascent industry. This is even harder considering also the multiple technological implementations behind each crypto-asset. Here we present a survey of the various solutions for this custody problem, comparing advantages and disadvantages. Then we delve deeper into some interesting schemes based on secure multiparty computation, which give a blockchain-agnostic solution that balances security, safety, and transactional ease of use, and in particular, a protocol that enhances practicality by exploiting a party that may stay offline during the key generation.

We present Terminus, a voting system based on blockchain technology. Terminus relies on technology solutions pioneered by Monero, a privacy-focused Blockchain, and on specifically designed operational procedures: this guarantees full anonymity of the vote and addresses several concerns of digital voting systems. Terminus was tested at an event of an Italian political movement, and will be used to carry out polls to drive some of the political decisions of this movement. We also introduce an evaluation framework for DLT voting systems, and use it to compare existing systems.