Deploying a Nationwide Referendum On-Chain

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Speaker: Felix Maduakor

Type: Talk

Expertise: Some familiarity with the topic

Event: Devcon

Date: Nov 2026

In 2025 we conducted a nationwide referendum in Germany (Abstimmung21), with a total of 63,000 voters, of whom 13,000 voted on-chain, without any voter needing to create a wallet, pay gas fees, or have blockchain experience. As openPetition, a Berlin-based non-profit with limited blockchain experience, we built [opn.vote](https://opn.vote), a publicly verifiable voting system that decentralized most of the voting process, in a way that ordinary people could use it. We will share from our viewpoint what we have learned along the way and showcase that teams with limited blockchain experience can also build meaningful blockchain applications that can be used by ordinary people. We will explore the positive aspects, like EVM compatibility, a decentralized validator set, robust tooling/services, and the friction points and ecosystem gaps we experienced (e.g., limited key management, missing network layer censorship resistance).