Private DAO governance and delegation

What this enables

• →Votes that can't be front-run by other votes. On every transparent governance system, early votes are public, so late voters follow the leading side and whales telegraph the result before quorum. Secret-until-close voting keeps every ballot in an encrypted note until the window ends; only the aggregate tally is proven and revealed. No bandwagon, no whale signaling.
• →Permanently private governance for sensitive decisions. Some votes — treasury allocations, legal settlements, contributor comp, contentious forks — should never expose who voted which way, even after close. A permanently-private mode reveals only the STARK-proven aggregate result and never the per-voter breakdown.
• →Delegation nobody can see. A holder delegates 5M tokens; the delegate votes with that weight; the public never learns the source. Today delegation is a public graph that de-anonymizes whales and lets them be lobbied, threatened, or bribed. Private delegation breaks the link between the token holder and the voting power they lend.
• →Verifiable outcomes without a trusted counter. The final tally is a STARK proof over encrypted ballots, computed in the Enclave. Anyone can verify the result is a correct aggregation of eligible votes without decrypting a single one — no snapshot admin, no multisig counting the votes by hand.
• →Sybil-resistant private ballots. Eligibility (token weight at snapshot) is proven against the Privacy Pool commitment set, so one holder can't split into many voters and can't vote twice, even though the individual ballot stays confidential.

What you build

A Governance helper contract that anchors a proposal, its snapshot block, and its eligibility commitment set, then accepts ballots as encrypted notes committing to (choice, weight) without revealing either. Voting runs in two modes: secret-until-close, where ballots stay sealed until the window ends, and permanently-private, where only the aggregate is ever surfaced. The Enclave performs confidential tally and emits a STARK proof that the revealed result is the correct weighted sum over eligible, non-double-counted ballots. Private delegation is a separate note type: a holder assigns weight to a delegate's execution identity through the Privacy Pool so the delegate can vote with combined power while the holder→delegate edge stays unlinkable. Viewing keys let a governance committee or auditor reconstruct the full ballot book under authorization without exposing it publicly.

Why this isn't Shutter

Shutter has already validated shielded voting as a real governance primitive: encrypted votes hidden until a reveal phase, live across 881+ DAOs (87% still using it after a year) and 372,000+ votes encrypted. But Shutter's model is threshold-encryption timelock — ballots are hidden only until the reveal window opens, then decrypted in full, so nothing is permanently private and the per-voter breakdown always becomes public. It also does nothing for delegation: on every Shutter-integrated DAO the delegation graph stays fully transparent, so whales are still visible and still lobbied. STRK20 covers both gaps — a permanently-private mode that reveals only the STARK-proven aggregate, and delegation routed through the Privacy Pool so the whale→delegate link is never observable.