Moscow has announced plans to implement blockchain technology in its e-voting system ‘Active Citizen,’ becoming the first city in the world to implement the technology in e-voting on such a large scale.

Blockchain technology would enable every Muscovite to become a part of the blockchain in Active Citizen – every citizen becomes a node of the peer-to-peer network and will be able to record and store the database of votes. In addition, they would be able to count the votes and verify the authenticity of results in real time.

Through blockchain, every vote will become a smart contract which is publicly viewable and transparent. Once the vote is placed, it will be listed in a ledger consisting of all votes taken place across a peer-to-peer network. It will guarantee that the data will not be lost or altered by someone after the vote was cast so there is no chance for fraud or third-party interference.

“We are excited to improve credibility and transparency of e-voting system in Moscow by introducing blockchain. We believe that blockhain will increase trust between the citizens and the government. We aim to hit 2 mln users in the near future who are ready to influence the city life,” Artem Ermolaev, CIO of Moscow said in a statement.

According to the official release, the authorities have chosen to launch blockchain while preserving the existing architecture of Active Citizen platform. This will involve recording the votes from the app and website to the server, and then simultaneously to the standard relational database and the blockchain network.

During the pilot, the authorities aim to test several aspects: failure reliability, resilience to updates, speed of data processing, and correct synchronization of nodes. If successful, they plan to store the entire data with blockchain technology and to replicate it to other IT projects in Moscow.