State of Private Voting 2026

Today we’re excited to share The State of Private Voting 2026, a report prepared by the Shutter and Privacy Stewards of Ethereum (PSE) teams.

The report provides a comprehensive look at the current landscape of private voting protocols on Ethereum. The report introduces a structured evaluation framework for assessing voting protocols and tools, compares different solutions according to the evaluation framework, and highlights shared challenges and synergies between projects. Together, these insights paint a clear picture of where private voting stands today and where it’s headed next for decentralized governance.

Inside the report:

The Need for Private Voting: Why private voting matters for decentralized governance and the growing risks of public onchain voting.
The Challenges of Private Voting: Why adding privacy complicates transparency, verification, and delegation trust within DAOs.
Analysis of Private Voting Protocols: A structured evaluation of leading projects across key dimensions - Integrity & Correctness, Privacy, Verifiability, Voter Authentication & Integrity, Voting Methods, Flexibility, Delegation & Representation, and Practical Considerations.
Recommendations: Guidance on which protocols excel in Implementation Maturity, Censorship Resistance and Liveness, Coercion Resistance, Gas Efficiency, and Delegation Privacy.
Future Work: Key open challenges and research priorities - from growing DAO demand and refining trust models to standardizing integrations, improving cross-chain efficiency, and advancing quantum-resistant cryptography.

Snapshot of Analysis of Voting Protocols

The following private voting protocols were analyzed in this report. This includes established protocols, published research with upcoming prototypes, and promising protocols on the development stage. The following list is ordered by rank of the “implementation maturity” property and then in alphabetical order.