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Russian opposition leader Mark Feygin launches blockchain-based referendum on Vladimir Putin’s election victory
Vladimir Putin has just won his fifth term as Russian president, although his 87% landslide election victory has been labeled preordained, managed on stage it’s a stage.
Now, exiled opposition leader Mark Feygin is leading an effort to give Russians an anonymous, blockchain-based way to register a “protest vote” against Putin.
The results of this effort, of course, would have no legal weight in Russia and would not in themselves end Putin’s presidency, but the referendum could, in theory, give a public relations boost to attempts to oust him. And it gives Russians a chance to express criticism in a nation where the consequences of dissent can be severe; Opposition leader Alexei Navalny recently died while incarcerated in an Arctic penal colony.
The vote will be conducted on an app called Russia2024, created using Rarimo’s Freedom Tool, which will use the Arbitrum blockchain and zero-knowledge cryptography, making voters’ identities untraceable.
“Dissent in Russia is becoming increasingly risky, and public opinion is increasingly difficult to monitor,” Feygin said in a statement. He was exiled from Russia years ago, appointed a foreign agent in 2022 and remains a wanted person in Russia. He is a former lawyer for the founders of the protest collective Pussy Riot. “Providing reliable, surveillance-proof avenues for protests and polls is critical. Russia2024 and the technology behind it have enabled this,” he added.
Users will need to download the Russia2024 app and prove their citizenship by scanning their passports with their phones. The passports have a biometric chip that the tool uses to confirm the voter’s identity and facilitate anonymous voting. If a person does not own a smartphone, a single phone can be used as a shared voting machine.
Voting will be allowed for around two weeks and supporters of the tool are “confident” that it is a safe way to vote and that voters need not fear repercussions.
“Even after Navalny’s death, people came out and protested to vote as a countermeasure to the result,” said Freedom Tool co-founder Lasha Antadze, who previously worked with the Ukrainian government to digitize the privatization of state properties. “Decentralized Voting and the Freedom Tool are designed so that there is no single entity to attack, block or eliminate. You can’t hack it just like you can’t hack bitcoin.”
Antadze also holds passports from Ukraine and Georgia. Putin’s victory is expected to give him the means to continue his war against Ukraine.
“We are distributing open source technology to everyone. It’s not just Ukrainian or Georgian buildings,” Antadze said when asked if this was supported by Ukrainian interests. “We received a lot of contributions via anonymous letters from Russian cryptography professors. It’s a kind of defense technology in time of war.
Antadze, who spoke to CoinDesk from London, said the Russia2024 app was initially removed from Apple’s app store, but they expect it to come back online this Friday. The app is available on the Google app store.
The main global “real world use case” is that it “can ensure such authenticity”, it can “reduce the costs” of any election-related voting exercise by “10x” and the technology can also be used by other nations , Antadze said.