Extending Privacy in Governance: Verifiable Secret Ballots on Aragon with Enclave
Aragon and Enclave are deepening the privacy spectrum in onchain governance, introducing verifiable secret ballots that make voting both confidential and provably secure.
Privacy is essential to meaningful governance. It gives participants the freedom to express their views without pressure, ensuring outcomes reflect genuine consensus rather than influence. Earlier this year, Aragon introduced private onchain voting with MACI, giving projects a way to protect individual choices while maintaining accountability and transparency.
Today, we’re announcing another step forward in that direction. In collaboration with Enclave, Aragon is extending its privacy architecture to include verifiable secret ballots, a system that combines confidentiality with verifiability, ensuring votes remain private while results can be publicly proven correct.
This isn’t a replacement for the privacy tools already available on Aragon, it’s an expansion of our offering as every solution brings new functionality. Together, MACI and Enclave form a modular approach to privacy that adapts to the unique needs of governance systems as they grow in size and sophistication.
From private voting to verifiable privacy
MACI introduced private voting with accountability, using a trusted coordinator to ensure votes are valid and correctly tallied through zero-knowledge proofs. Enclave builds on this foundation by extending verifiable privacy into a coordinator-free model, where computation itself happens on encrypted data.
In Enclave, confidentiality and correctness are enforced end-to-end. Votes remain encrypted from input to tally, and results are verified through cryptographic proofs. There is no trusted party who can see the outcome of the vote.
This is achieved through CRISP, Enclave’s Coercion-Resistant Impartial Selection Protocol, which runs on a network of Encrypted Execution Environments (E3s). These environments combine Fully Homomorphic Encryption, Multi-Party Computation, and Zero-Knowledge Proofs to compute securely on encrypted data. The result is a voting system that is private, auditable, and coordinator-free. No single operator holds keys or controls the outcome.
For projects and protocols, the integration represents a lightweight addition to existing workflows. There’s no redeployment, no new cryptographic setup, and no additional coordination required. Confidential, verifiable voting becomes accessible through Aragon OSx as a modular, composable component of governance.
A broader privacy architecture
Privacy in governance should never be monolithic. Different systems need different balances between transparency and confidentiality. Aragon’s goal is to make privacy modular, so projects can choose the guarantees that fit their context.
With MACI, we delivered private voting with accountability: protecting individual choices while maintaining transparent tallies. With Enclave, we add privacy with verifiability: protecting the process itself by making correctness cryptographically provable.
Together, they form the foundation of Aragon’s privacy stack, a flexible architecture for projects that want to scale decision-making securely without compromising openness. Privacy becomes an input to governance design, not an afterthought, enabling projects to evolve how they handle participation and trust over time.
By introducing verifiable secret ballots through Enclave, Aragon strengthens this foundation. Governance systems can now pair usability with stronger guarantees of security and confidentiality, creating conditions for more honest, expressive, and reliable participation.
Extending privacy, extending trust
This collaboration signals the next phase in Aragon’s work to make governance more secure, resilient, and expressive. Privacy protects participants. Verifiability protects outcomes. Together, they reinforce the integrity of governance itself.
Aragon and Enclave share a vision of privacy that scales: privacy that’s composable, provable, and ready to integrate wherever governance happens. As projects adopt more sophisticated models for coordination, the ability to vote privately, verify publicly, and govern securely becomes essential infrastructure.
To learn more about verifiable secret ballots and Enclave’s encrypted execution network, head to enclave.gg.
If your team is exploring how to extend privacy in your governance design, get in touch with the Aragon team.