Election dApp Tutorial

Welcome to the Kadena Election dApp tutorial. In this tutorial you will create a website for the election of the new president of the Kadena Universe. All members of the Kadena community will be able to cast one vote on any of the candidates nominated by the election officials. Because all votes, as well as the voting mechanism itself, are openly published on the blockchain, the election process is fully transparent. Everyone can check if the election proceeded fairly and, for instance, no double votes were cast. Nevertheless, the privacy of all voters is protected, because they are voting with an anonymous Kadena account. Every vote is a transaction on the blockchain, which comes at the price of a gas fee to paid to the miners. The election organization will utilize a gas station that pays the gas for all voting transactions, so the election is accessible for all community members, for free.

The concept of a gas station is a central topic of this tutorial, but definitely not the only one. You will learn about creating and funding accounts. You will learn how to deal with permissions by leveraging keyset and capabilities. You will learn how to interact with the blockchain from your code. You will be reading data from the blockchain for free and send transactions that cost gas. You will also learn how to deploy a smart contract and upgrade it, i.e. deploy changes to your smart contract. You will learn how to do this on a Dockerized Devnet running on your own computer, and to Kadena's Testnet. Before deploying anything you will learn how to develop smart contracts using the test-driven methodology. You will dive into the different ways to sign transactions: with keypairs, Chainweaver and other wallet providers. Along the way, you will learn about a wide range of tooling that is available for blockchain development in the Kadena platform, like the Kadena JavaScript client library, Chainweaver, the Pact command line executable and more.

This tutorial consists of multiple chapters. In the first chapter you will start off with a working front-end that stores candidates and votes in memory. The next chapters will guide you through the process of building a blockchain back-end for the election website one step at a time. The tutorial's git repository contains branches with starter code for every chapter. When you are following along with the tutorial, you can compare your solution with with the starter code of the next chapter. The branch name that corresponds to each chapter will be provided at the top of the respective chapter page.

In the future additional chapters may be added to this tutorial. Some ideas are already floating around, but if you have any suggestions for topics you would like to see covered, please get in touch.

Before moving on to the first chapter of this tutorial, please make sure that you have the required software installed on your computer. The tutorial assumes that you have basic working knowledge of the software listed below.

Let's start creating a website for the election of the new president of the Kadena Universe. Good luck and have fun with Chapter 01: Getting started.