Technical Whitepaper

Agora Whitepaper

A comprehensive guide to Agora — the privacy-preserving anonymous social ecosystem combining zero-knowledge voting, community discourse, reputation, and private settlement on the Canton Network.

Key Features

ZK Stack

Semaphore v4 + RLN + UniRep + 6 circom circuits for anonymous voting, spam-resistant posts, and epoch-based reputation

Canton Network Settlement

A live Canton Network mainnet validator anchors votes and settles Canton Coin fees privately, backed by a DAML attribution ledger

Privacy by Design

Identity never linked to content, k≥25 anonymity on analytics, shielded fee proofs, and client-side proof generation

Introduction

Agora is a privacy-preserving anonymous social ecosystem. It combines zero-knowledge voting (Semaphore v4), spam-resistant anonymous posts and comments (RLN), epoch-based pseudonymous reputation (UniRep), and private settlement on the Canton Network — all within a single platform built for communities, organizations, and DAOs.

Traditional survey, polling, and social platforms suffer from four critical failures: privacy exposure leading to 67% self-censorship, trust deficits from centralized and alterable results, low engagement with 33% average response rates, and an $84B+ market plagued by response bias. Agora addresses these through cryptographic guarantees and a tamper-evident settlement ledger on the Canton Network.

The platform comprises 48 backend modules, 22 extracted core packages, and 6 custom circom circuits spanning its zero-knowledge, analytics, and settlement layers. Agora runs its own live Canton Network mainnet validator: votes can be recorded directly on the Canton ledger, poll-activation and reward fees settle privately in Canton Coin through a shielded fee pool, and a DAML attribution ledger provides a tamper-evident audit trail.

This whitepaper provides a comprehensive overview of Agora's architecture, security model, tokenomics, and vision for the future of anonymous participation.

Platform Statistics

Live
Canton Network mainnet validator — operational
6
Custom circom circuits (Semaphore · RLN · UniRep)
k ≥ 25
Anonymity floor enforced on every analytics metric
22
Extracted @agora/* core packages