Closing the Governance Privacy Gap On-Chain

Shutter proposes a fully on-chain Shielded Voting design for Ethereum and EVM chains that keeps individual votes private until the voting period ends, using threshold encryption with minimal changes to existing Governor frameworks. The article says Vitalik Buterin's May 21, 2025 tweet, "we need privacy in governance," motivated the work, and that Shutter's off-chain Shielded Voting on Snapshot has already helped over 600 DAOs. In the described flow, a proposer registers an encryption key in the Governor contract, voters submit encrypted ballots, and Shutter Keypers release decryption-key shares after the window closes. An executor then decrypts the votes and posts zero-knowledge proofs of correct decryption on-chain.