Athena

Inspiration

We realized that there was a disconnect between shareholders and executive boards in corporations. How do shareholders ensure that they have a voice that is proportional to their share in the company in decisions? Traditional democratic voting can't come close to achieving this.

What it does

Enter the Athena protocol. It's a honest utility voting scheme based on CTT voting that ensures that players vote honestly according to their preferences for each option. Each voter is assigned a certain number of AthenaCoins proportional to their share of the company. Then, the administrative board can use the Athena platform to ask a question and present a certain number of options. Each voter stakes a certain number of their coins on each option (0 to 100%). Afterwards, the staked coins are aggregated and a winning option is chosen. Then, each voter is subjected to what is called a "Clarke Tax". The tax is computed as follows: for each voter, an alternative election is held in which that voter did not vote. If the alternate winner is different from the original one, then the margin by which the alternate winner won is charged to the voter. This way, each voter is charged for having a more influential vote. In order to incentivize members to vote, voters all receive a little bit of interest at the end of the phase. To keep the game theory mechanisms secure, all the staked tokens are burned.

How we built it

Backend: SuperVoting.sol: selects the voting mechanism being used VotingMechanism.sol: handles the all the logic of the Athena voting protocol, including admin and voter functions. Token.sol: creates the internal token Frontend: React.js

Challenges we ran into

We spent a lot of time thinking about the game theory of the mechanism and whether or not there was a way for a voter to manipulate the protocol. We also had a lot of trouble linking the react frontend to the backend contracts.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how link react.js interfaces with web3 and solidity, as well as the importance of user interface in general.

What's next for Athena

We want to integrate an identity management platform like uPort in order to prevent Sybil attacks. We also want to be able to adopt the protocol to DAOs and other blockchain platforms, not just enterprises.