DAVINCI, Ask the World

Online voting has a fundamental trust problem: any platform can claim its results are accurate, but communities can’t verify that only eligible voters cast ballots and that votes were unadulterated. Systems that try to add verifiability often compromise privacy, requiring personal data like a driver’s license or passport photo upload. Those who eliminate that step to protect anonymity often can't prove eligibility. No existing tool delivers all of these properties at once.

This is what the team behind DAVINCI Protocol set out to change. DAVINCI is building the infrastructure for verifiable, privacy-preserving democratic participation at scale with a full voting stack that delivers end-to-end verifiability, complete voter anonymity, coercion resistance, censorship resistance, and a gasless Web2 experience, simultaneously and without trade-offs.

Their new Mini App, Ask the World, puts that infrastructure to work. It's a mini app that lets any community run a voting process with real-world eligibility criteria, verified via Self’s support of 135+ countries via passports, ID cards, and Aadhaar, while preserving complete voter anonymity. 

Self provides the identity layer that makes it possible. When a voter joins an Ask the World poll, they scan a QR code with the Self app, which generates a zero-knowledge proof entirely on their device. That proof confirms they meet the eligibility criteria (country of origin, age, etc.) without revealing any personal information, not even to Self. DAVINCI's census contract verifies the proof cryptographically, and the vote is cast, sequenced, and committed onchain. The final results are publicly auditable by anyone.

The use cases are immediate and real: unions running contract votes free from employer surveillance, neighborhood communities making decisions with verified residency, academic research collecting verified demographic responses with protected privacy, and international groups coordinating with proof-of-membership across borders.

DAVINCI is the first project to combine all of these properties in a single stack. Built on a foundation developed alongside Vocdoni, pioneers in decentralised voting infrastructure, the protocol inherits years of research into coercion-resistant, receipt-free voting, now extended with on-chain settlement and a pluggable identity layer.

Ask the World is live today as an experimental proof-of-concept. 

Try Ask the World: asktheworld.davinci.ninja

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