National Settlement Depository (NSD), Russia’s central securities depository, has successfully completed the development of a blockchain-based electronic voting system, Forklog reported.

Hyperledger Fabric was used in developing the system, along with zero-knowledge protocol for an increased level of confidentiality among participants. The system also allows traceability of events through a tokenization voting process using cryptography and smart contract techniques.

"Creating the confidential Hyperledger Fabric variations due tokenization enables us to offer a mathematically proven level of protection of privacy, accepted by market participants. Our next challenge is to scale this solution to other application scenarios in the post-trading services ", Alex Yakovlev, head of decentralized solutions at NSD, said (loosely translated).

E-proxy technology was introduced at NSD in August 2014. In April 2015, NSD upgraded the technology, bringing it in line with the global ISO standards. In April 2016, a blockchain-based prototype of e-proxy voting successfully passed the testing related to bondholder meetings. Last year, NSD tested an e-proxy voting prototype based on the NXT distributed cryptographic platform.

Earlier this month, NSD announced that the e-voting platform will be used for the first time at Sberbank’s annual general meeting of shareholders summing up the 2016 results. NSD explained that the platform is accessible anywhere in the world with no special technical means required to vote. It is available for all categories of shareholders regardless of where their securities are held – in the register or with a depository. If an investor owns shares of a few companies, he/she may vote via the platform’s services without bearing additional costs.