Japanese Startup Receives Developer Grant to Build a Blockchain-based Electronic Voting System with Embedded User ID

PHI Inc. is the first company in Japan to be awarded the ‘Free and Open Grant’ by the Concordium Foundation. The grant has been awarded for the development of an innovative electronic open voting project, called Govote, which will run on the Concordium blockchain.

The PHI team has been working on a business model for managing teams and projects through a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) preparing for the Web3 era.The Govote project is part of PHI's vision of digital governance of DAO society. Govote can be used for a general meeting of shareholders, distributed teams building and online communities.

In their search for a blockchain platform to meet the requirements of the next-generation voting system, the PHI team found Concordium blockchain which implements identity management. Privacy and anonymity are inherent  to voting mechanisms to Govote, which uses blockchain technology and zero-knowledge proofs to provide voting rights, vote anonymity, and tamper-resistance of voting results.

Lone Fønss Schrøder, CEO, Concordium, commented:

“Online voting has long been talked about and is gaining momentum, especially in the post-COVID era. While the technology has been available for quite some time, concern is still rampant about the permeability and vulnerability of these systems. Using blockchain to overcome some of the challenges, is yet another use case for this technology. It is our honor to work together with the PHI team to make online voting a reality.”

Takashi Oka, Co-founder of PHI commented,

"We are delighted to be the first team in Japan to receive a grant from the Concordium Foundation. PHI team will be a bridge between Web2.0 and Web3.0, which will greatly contribute to the development of the blockchain space. Behind the slow progress in the use of public blockchain by companies and public cases, there is a very high hurdle to meet the regulatory requirements such as AML/CFT. On Concordium, it is possible to develop applications/services that solve this problem by utilizing the ID function to achieve both identity verification and privacy."

Concordium, based in Switzerland, is defining a new category of compliance facilitating blockchains. Concordium is a Web 3.0 based, sustainable and science-proven blockchain. It is the first decentralized blockchain with identification at the protocol level which helps facilitate greater regulatory compliance. This identity layer offers transactional privacy while supporting regulatory accountability, and, as such, is a great match with use cases of this nature.