Agora
Engineering for one of crypto's earliest blockchain-voting protocols
Table of Contents
Agora is a Swiss lab and foundation building secure, transparent digital voting systems for governments and organisations. Its voting ecosystem runs on a custom blockchain that has been in development since 2015, with decentralised apps for online voting, ballot tracking, election financials, and election organisation. CEO Leonardo Gammar built the early foundation with EPFL's blockchain lab, turning the voting problem into a verifiable digital infrastructure problem.
The milestone was Sierra Leone's March 2018 presidential election. Agora was invited by the National Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone as an international observer to run an independent pilot study, partially deploying its digital voting protocol to record votes from a sample of polling stations on an immutable blockchain ledger.
Holdex's role
Holdex supported Agora's dApp layer, bringing product engineering to a protocol built specifically for secure digital voting.
The story
The stack combines a custom blockchain, a fair consensus mechanism, and participatory security infrastructure. VOTE is the native utility token of the ecosystem, used to incentivise citizens and selected organisations acting as election authenticators. The network design separates consensus nodes from citizen auditor nodes, giving the system both institutional processing and public verification.
Partnerships extended the stack beyond the core protocol. Diginex opened an implementation path in Asia. Synaps brought KYC infrastructure for voter and auditor verification, keeping sensitive identity checks with a dedicated third-party provider rather than inside Agora itself.
Links
- Site: agora.vote
- Blog: medium.com/agorablockchain