Voting Update and New NPM Module!

The NEM Voting Standard is in a good place right now, with its most frequent use case currently being voting on community fund proposals, which is working great, but we think it’s use cases can go well beyond just that. One of the barriers for creating new voting applications is the fact that it’s only complete implementation is on the NanoWallet (the explorer at http://explorer.nemchina.com has an excellent vote counting and exploring implementation, but you can not vote or create polls with an explorer).

The first step taken to ease adoption of voting by developers was to create a detailed technical specification of the standard. It explains in great detail all aspects of the standard, so anybody can fully understand its workings. But ideally any developer should be able to implement voting in their applications without the need to know every little detail of the operations, and also a change in the standard would mean every voting implementation in every application would need to be changed. We have been working for a while on a solution for both of these problems, and we are now proud to announce its release to the public:

Nem-Voting is an npm module to be used together with nem-library, enabling any developer that wants to include voting on their solutions to do so easily and effectively, without the need to know all the inner workings and optimizations.

The new implementation is not only easier to use by developers, but also features some functionalities that are not available in NanoWallet right now, it provides an efficiency improvement (vote creation and counting are faster thanks to some optimizations made with nem-library), it has some security improvements and very importantly it makes maintaining the code much simpler and faster, since only the voting implementation needs to be changed and all the applications using it only need to update their dependencies.

The new implementation has been added to NanoWallet already, providing a speed boost to voting functionalities, and is soon going to be implemented in the nemchina (formerly the ournem.com) explorer.

New people keep coming into the NEM ecosystem with cool innovative projects. We are excited to see what they will come up with using voting, and we hope to see many more use cases for it with the entry barriers lowered for developers. The voting standard keeps being worked on and improving every day, and it will continue to be worked on, with a big update coming for the new version of NEM with many new features to help make the community more democratic. New features include voting with mosaics as a proof of stake and even an implementation of liquid democracy, and more!

I would like to thank the NEM community for the support and in particular, Jeff and Rin who helped me with ideas and testing, without them this wouldn’t be possible.