MuesliSwap Off-Chain Governance allows for users to cast secret and verifiable votes on proposals that affect the MuesliSwap ecosystem. The whole process not require an on-chain representation - it is completely off-chain. Still, the vote result is immutable and cannot be tampered with. This is because the Governance Platform is built on top of Helios, a secure verifiable voting system. At the same time, this kind of Governance allows for a faster and fee-free voting process.
The first larger vote on the MuesliSwap Off-Chain Governance established the process for future votes. You can find more details on this in the corresponding governance forum. In short, the process is as follows:
The amount of MILK you hold in your wallet, is staked into the staking vault or is locked in MILK/ADA liquidity tokens and farms counts towards your voting power. The total voting power of your wallet is displayed when submitting a vote. We are also building a tool to display your voting power for each vote in retrospect.
The MuesliSwap Off-Chain Governance is built on top of Helios, a secure verifiable voting system. You can find out more about Helios in the FAQ below.
Helios is truly verifiable. Each voter obtains a ballot tracker which can be checked against the Ballot Tracking Center to ensure that the ballot was received and tallied appropriately. What this means is that no one, not even the administrators of the Helios Voting system, can alter your vote.
Many voting systems claim to be voter-verifiable. We believe voter-verifiability is critically important, and we support the efforts of other organizations to help improve the voting machines used in public-office elections. However, we believe that more extensive verifiability is needed, with voters able to ensure that the tallying process, not just the recording of their ballot, was performed correctly. We call that “true verifiability.” Others have called this concept “end-to-end verifiability” or “open-audit.”
Helios takes great care to protect the secrecy of your vote. Your vote is encrypted inside your browser before it is even sent to the server. Even on older browsers, your vote is encrypted before you log into Helios. In all cases, your vote is stored in the database only in encrypted form. Helios then uses advanced cryptographic techniques to combine all of the encrypted votes into an encrypted tally, and only the tally is decrypted. This means that your ballot is never individually decrypted. To provide for the highest level of privacy, Helios lets election administrators designate multiple trustees. All trustees must be involved in decryption, which further ensures that only the tally, never the individual votes, are decrypted.
A typical tracking number, say for shipping a package, is more or less a random number: it means nothing other than the label on your package. It’s conceivable that your package gets there, tracking number intact, but its contents destroyed. In the digital world, we’re able to produce a special kind of tracking number that is far from random: it is a fingerprint of the encryption of your vote. So, if your ballot tracker makes it all the way to the tally, you know that not only did your ballot make it into the tally, you also know that it wasn’t tampered with in the process.