Voting in crypto governance has a dirty secret: it’s not actually secret. Most DAO votes are cast from pseudonymous wallets on public blockchains, meaning anyone with a block explorer can see exactly how you voted. That creates a problem that goes beyond mere privacy discomfort. It opens the door to coercion, vote buying, and social pressure that undermines the entire point of democratic decision-making.
CRISP, short for Coercion-Resistant Impartial Selection Protocol, is a new attempt to fix that. Launched in May 2026 by the Interfold project-which evolved from Gnosis Guild’s Enclave-the protocol brings together three heavyweight cryptographic techniques to create what amounts to a digital secret ballot.
How CRISP actually works
The protocol rests on three cryptographic pillars: fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), and distributed threshold cryptography (DTC). Each solves a different piece of the private voting puzzle.
Fully homomorphic encryption is the star of the show. In English: it lets you perform math on encrypted data without ever decrypting it. Think of it like a sealed ballot box that can count its own contents without anyone opening it. Votes go in encrypted, get tallied while still encrypted, and only the final result gets revealed.
Zero-knowledge proofs handle the verification side. They let the system confirm a vote is valid, the voter is eligible, and the final tally is correct-all without revealing any individual vote.
Distributed threshold cryptography is the decentralization layer. Instead of trusting a single party to hold the decryption key, CRISP splits that responsibility across a network of economically incentivized node operators called Ciphernodes. No single Ciphernode can decrypt anything on its own. A threshold number of them must cooperate to reveal the final result.
What makes it coercion-resistant
CRISP is designed to be receipt-free: voters cannot generate proof of how they voted, even if they wanted to. This breaks the coercion chain entirely. The protocol also supports censorship-resistant submission and anonymous participant engagement, making the act of voting private and unstoppable.
Open source, no token, broader ambitions
The project has no native token. The entire codebase is open source, hosted on GitHub under gnosisguild/enclave. Interfold positions itself as infrastructure, focusing on encrypted execution environments (E3s) that extend beyond voting. Gnosis Guild also applied for a Zcash Community Grant to bring CRISP’s capabilities to the Zcash community.