Great summary of the Governance Wars from BeethovenX’s aspect! I agree with you that having a Bribing platform on Astroport will be vital to facilitate the inevitable “Star Wars” that will be happening with the launch of voting gauges.
I feel that a way that we can also reduce the gaming of the voting is to allow only vxASTRO holders to receive bribes, rather than to allow both $xASTRO and vxASTRO holders to get it. $xASTRO holders can still vote as it will benefit them if the Liquidity Pools that they have a stake in receives more emission rewards. Given that acquiring vxASTRO requires locking up your $xASTRO for a certain duration, this will prevent users from buying $ASTRO to stake for $xASTRO just to participate in the voting and exit their positions immediately given that there are no limitations on $xASTRO.
Furthermore, only allowing vxASTRO holders to receive bribes can also further incentivize more users to lock up their $xASTRO, which is generally a positive maneuver for the price action of $ASTRO
However, a potential problem that I’ve read about here is that there is a chance that users may be incentivized to vote for increased emission rewards for liquidity pools that have low trading volume just because of the bribing rewards. This may be detrimental for Astroport because trading volume is essentially our revenue source. Incentivizing Liquidity into Pools that do not need it means that other higher volume pools may be neglected. The suggestion offered to this issue was to allow for voters to only receive fees from the pools that they voted. This means that if someone voted for a LP with low transaction volume, he or she can will earn a lot lesser as compared to someone who voted for a high volume pool. However, given that $xASTRO and vxASTRO are already coded to receive fees from all pools as long as there are trades happening, this may be an issue that is difficult to resolve.
Which is why I believe that your concept of “Antagonistic Voting” may be useful in this scenario! Based on this, we can even implement a 2 stage voting:
Stage 1 Voting:
to vote for which are the liquidity pools to qualify for the gauge voting. This can be based off a few criteria such as trading volume, quality of protocol and other important metrics which the Astral Assembly can decide on. During this stage, voters can even vote away pools with poor performance or pools formed under your “Bad Actors” scenario
Stage 2 Voting:
to vote for the amount of increased emissions for the liquidity pools.