PrivateDAO

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  Production-grade private governance for Solana DAOs using commit-reveal voting, timelocked execution, and treasury safety checks.

Inspiration

What it does

How I built it

Inspiration

Most DAO stacks leak votes and interim tally in real time. That creates predictable failure modes:

• vote buying while the live tally swings,
• intimidation / herd behavior,
• governance bribery correlated with timing.

PrivateDAO started as a governance primitive that keeps voting state non-public during the voting phase, while still preserving deterministic execution on Solana.

What it does

PrivateDAO is a Solana governance protocol that implements:

• Commit–reveal voting with hidden tally during the voting window.
• Multiple voting modes:
  • Token-weighted
  • Quadratic voting
  • Dual-chamber / threshold-style governance
• Automated proposal execution with a timelock and treasury safety checks.

How we built it

• Anchor program (programs/private-dao/src/lib.rs) for core governance logic.
• End-to-end tests for the full lifecycle:
  • tests/demo.ts (full lifecycle demo)
  • tests/full-flow-test.ts (integration flow)
• CI quality gates using GitHub Actions to enforce build + tests.
• A lightweight GitHub Pages frontend (docs/index.html) that showcases the protocol and links to the demo.

Security posture (high-level)

• Commitment binding: sha256(vote || salt || voter_pubkey) to prevent replay across voters.
• Snapshot at commit time to prevent vote weight manipulation across phases.
• Safe execution model: timelock + explicit checks before treasury actions.

Challenges

• Designing privacy-preserving governance within Solana’s deterministic execution model.
• Handling operational realities (devnet funding, compute constraints, end-to-end repeatable workflows).
• Keeping the “demo experience” simple while the protocol logic stays rigorous.

What's next

• Move from commit–reveal privacy to single-phase privacy using encrypted commitments + zk proof verification for tally correctness.
• Modularize verifier components for broader composability across Solana programs.
• Expand treasury policy controls and add configurable security guardrails.

Links

• Repo: https://github.com/X-PACT/PrivateDAO
• Live demo frontend: https://x-pact.github.io/PrivateDAO/
• Devnet Program ID: 62qdrtJGP23PwmvAn5c5B9xT1LSgdnq4p1sQsHnKVFhm ## Challenges I ran into

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

What I learned

What's next for PrivateDAO

Built With

• anchor-(0.32.1)
• github-actions-(ci)
• github-pages-(frontend-docs/demo)
• node.js
• rust
• sha-256-commitments
• solana
• solana-devnet
• timelock
• typescript
• yarn