With voting currently being a signaling mechanism I’m floating the idea of using gasless voting.
In such a design the cost of voting would be significantly less then the current on-chain mechanism and should bring in more participation from YFI holders assuming YIP-10 passes.
In the simplest form it could involve taking the current voting UI and instead of submitting a vote to the chain, it could be sent to a chat room or discussion thread as a signed messages. The votes can then be validated by anyone and individual multisig holders would be able to use the same tool to determine the outcome of a vote.
Using Fraud Proofs:
A step up from that in complexity could be when a voting period ends there is a tabulation period (ie: 24 hours) in which anyone can aggregate all the votes into a merkle proof and submit the root hash for the vote along with the vote FORs and AGINSTs. If the submitter has misrepresented the vote outcome in the submission, anyone can submit a the full merkle proof to nullify the submission and a slashing mechanism can be implemented here as well. A ZK fraud proof can be used here as well. Such a design could work with onchain consequences where at the end of the tabulation period a transaction gets executed.
Using Validity Proofs:
In this design only valid proofs can be submitted to the contract which eliminates the need for the tabulation period above. Given that staking is linked to the voting contract this design maybe possible.
If there is enough interest we can research further to determine feasibility of the different approaches and as a starting point building a prototype soft consensus polling that could be used in before voting to determine interest and likely outcome of proposed votes.
More on Validity vs Fraud proofs: https://medium.com/starkware/validity-proofs-vs-fraud-proofs-4ef8b4d3d87a