Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology tests blockchain voting from Waves Enterprise

The Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) conducted a vote of the dissertation council using the blockchain service WE.Vote, developed by Waves Enterprise. ForkLog was informed by representatives of the company.

MIPT is among the institutions authorised by the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education to confer academic degrees autonomously. Accordingly, the university is developing a model for the participation of leading Russian and foreign specialists in dissertation councils.

“At the end of 2021 we conducted 38 defenses using the system. It allows monitoring the integrity of all stages of the procedure, while guaranteeing the secrecy of voting. We plan to switch to WE.Vote-based voting on a permanent basis,” said the Vice-Rector for Research at MIPT, Vitaly Bagan.

According to the developers, the distributed architecture of the service and the absence of a single point of failure ensure confidentiality, immutability of information, and full transparency for any participant in the process. Smart contracts prevent access by unauthorized participants to the voting and verify all user actions for accuracy. These conditions meet all the new requirements of the Higher Attestation Commission under the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation.

“Cryptographic mechanisms and homomorphic encryption guarantee the protection of the decision, allowing votes to be tallied without decrypting them, thereby completely preserving the secrecy of the vote. Decentralization of servers and distributed key generation guarantees the anonymity of voting participants,” commented Artem Kalikhov, CEO of Waves Enterprise.

Earlier in November 2021, the Dissertation Council of the Steklov Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences used the WE.Vote electronic voting service for awarding academic degrees.

In September 2021, the Russian Practical Shooting Federation used the WE.Vote service for assessing the quality of the held competitions.