How A 12-year-old Boy Developed An NFT Voting Platform

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What did you do dur­ing the long Covid-19 lock­down of 2020 and 2021? 

Learned to bake? Binged on Net­flix? Adopt­ed a pet?

For 12-year-old Rien Lewis Pec­son in Makati City, an afflu­ent sub­urb in the cap­i­tal Metro Mani­la, the answer is a lit­tle more sophis­ti­cat­ed than that. The eighth grad­er start­ed learn­ing to code and — in the span of one month, accord­ing to his moth­er — built the Philip­pines’ first non-fun­gi­ble token (NFT)-enabled blockchain vot­ing platform. 

Called iVote.ph, the site lets peo­ple vote on the NFT art­work — cre­at­ed by 28-year-old graph­ic design­er Neil Fer­nan­dez — depict­ing each of the Philip­pine pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates for 2022. Users sign up with their mobile num­bers, and are then assigned unique tokens. Answers are record­ed as indi­vid­ual, anony­mous trans­ac­tions on the blockchain, which means the voter’s per­son­al data isn’t exposed, though any­one can see and audit the results in real-time. 

“​​I’ve been hear­ing from the news, my par­ents and oth­er grown-ups, about the elec­tion and vot­ing issues in the Philip­pines,” Rien told Forkast.News. “I decid­ed that I would try to help fix it.”

Per­haps even more unusu­al than his age is the fact that Rien learned soft­ware devel­op­ment from his moth­er, who her­self says she’s self-taught as far as blockchain is con­cerned. Lie­zl Pec­son, 34, is the chief infor­ma­tion offi­cer at a fin­tech start­up in Man­daluy­ong, a city in Metro Mani­la. She said writ­ing soft­ware isn’t a core part of her job, but she slow­ly picked it up from col­leagues and the internet.

Short­ly after the first lock­down was imposed on the Philip­pines in March 2020, Lie­zl and her hus­band, who also works in IT, were both forced to work from home. They then decid­ed to home­school Rien and his two younger sib­lings. That’s when Rien blos­somed, she said.

“His inter­est in learn­ing oth­er stuff out­side of school real­ly start­ed [dur­ing] this pan­dem­ic”, Lie­zl recount­ed. “With home­school, it’s self-paced. So that [gave him] lots of time for oth­er activities.” 

At din­ner, the par­ents engaged the chil­dren in con­ver­sa­tions about dai­ly life and cur­rent events. They often spoke about the upcom­ing gen­er­al elec­tions, which, ampli­fied by social media and a pro­tract­ed lock­down, is turn­ing into one of the most divi­sive in recent memory. 

Can blockchain voting be trusted?

WhatsApp Image 2021 11 18 at 6.23.47 PM
iVote’s polling results since its launch on Oct. 25.

On iVote, out of six pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates, the polling results — total­ing near­ly 3,800 votes so far — over­whelm­ing­ly favor Fer­di­nand “Bong­bong” Mar­cos Jr., the son and name­sake of the late dic­ta­tor. Bong­bong has been in the lead from the time of iVote’s Oct. 25 launch to the time this sto­ry went to press.

And that rais­es a few ques­tions. The under­ly­ing blockchain pro­to­col of iVote is pow­ered by Cloud­chain, which is oper­at­ed by First Shoshin Hold­ings Corp (FSHC) — which in turn is owned by hus­band and wife Juan Ponce Enrile Jr. (“Jack”) and Sal­va­cion Ponce Enrile (“Sal­ly”). Jack is the son of Juan Ponce Enrile, a close ally and Defense Min­is­ter of the late dic­ta­tor Fer­di­nand Mar­cos. The elder Enrile is often described as the archi­tect of Phlip­pines’ mar­tial law.

In fact, on Nov. 5, the 97-year-old Enrile and his daugh­ter Kat­ri­na Ponce Enrile forged an alliance with Mar­cos Jr. at the latter’s house. That means the influ­en­tial Enrile fam­i­ly behind the blockchain sup­port­ing iVote is pub­licly endors­ing Mar­cos Jr. for pres­i­dent in the 2022 elec­tion, while Mar­cos Jr. will sup­port Katrina’s bid for a seat in Congress.

“There are no real [polit­i­cal] par­ties in the Philip­pines,” Julio Tee­hankee, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist who spe­cial­izes in elec­toral pol­i­tics, recent­ly told local cable news chan­nel One News. “It is clans, not par­ties, that are the build­ing blocks of Philip­pine pol­i­tics.” Old polit­i­cal clans are usu­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with “baili­wicks” — or strong provin­cial bases — which means in many ways, alliances with well-entrenched polit­i­cal fam­i­lies hold much more weight than par­ty support. 

By the way, Rien’s moth­er, Lie­zl, works for the Enrile fam­i­ly at First Shoshin. She asked that Forkast.News with­hold her employ­er infor­ma­tion, but Forkast.News believes the pub­lic inter­est in know­ing about these ties out­weighs the interviewee’s desire for confidentiality.

How secure and transparent is the technology?

All of this isn’t to sug­gest that the results on iVote are manip­u­lat­ed — but the issue does under­score the two Holy Grails of blockchain vot­ing: secu­ri­ty and transparency. 

“When dis­cussing crit­i­cal blockchain use cas­es like vot­ing, it’s nec­es­sary to begin our inquiry at the base lev­el — i.e., the blockchain itself,” said Luis Bue­naven­tu­ra, the coun­try man­ag­er of play-to-earn start­up Yield Guild Games and a lead­ing voice in the blockchain indus­try in the Philip­pines, in an inter­view with Forkast.News. “This is because issues like decen­tral­iza­tion and trans­paren­cy become increas­ing­ly rel­e­vant at the nation-scale.” 

“Although I am in favor of blockchain inno­va­tion and cer­tain­ly very much in favor of sup­port­ing tal­ent­ed young devel­op­ers, projects like iVote can­not be eval­u­at­ed in a vac­u­um,” Bue­naven­tu­ra added. “If it had been built on more decen­tral­ized blockchains like Poly­gon, Solana or Car­dano, my con­fi­dence lev­el would be much higher.”

Coin­ci­den­tal­ly, the Philip­pines in Sep­tem­ber did mock tri­als for blockchain-enabled vot­ing, with the goal of rolling it out to its over­seas pop­u­la­tion by 2025. But in a recent inter­view with Forkast.News, Elec­tion Com­mis­sion spokesman James Jimenez said they also real­ized it would take time before peo­ple warm up to blockchain voting.

“One of the things we noticed was that peo­ple were very hes­i­tant to use the tech­nol­o­gy, main­ly because they had doubts about its secu­ri­ty,” Jimenez said. “Of course, we hope to address that in the future by show­ing them that the secu­ri­ty for remote vot­ing is intense — that it goes beyond what nor­mal­ly would be con­sid­ered adequate”.

Now that iVote has got­ten some pub­lic atten­tion, with Rien and his moth­er recent­ly appear­ing as guests on CNN Philip­pines, the 12-year-old says he’s work­ing on addi­tion­al fea­tures, includ­ing a “cit­i­zen ver­i­fi­ca­tion sys­tem” — rough­ly the dig­i­tal equiv­a­lent of the know-your-cus­tomer (KYC) pro­to­col that banks follow. 

“[Through that] we will have the abil­i­ty to add a valid ID and the voter’s cre­den­tials,” Rien said. “We hope to sat­is­fy the require­ments for real elec­tions. And we want it [to be used] not just for pol­i­tics, but also [in] oth­er indus­tries and countries.”

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