In decentralized communities voting plays a crucial role in governance and development of roadmaps. Snapshot is disrupting the traditional DAO voting model with a gas free voting platform.
This is not a sponsored post and I have no stake in Snapshot, I do however like to use and promote open source tools which enable decentralized communities ❤️
How Snapshot Works
Votes are cast through signed messages which verifies the user owns the keys to the wallet which holds the tokens or voting rights. These signed messages are validated off-chain creating a gas free experience.
At the core of the voting process are three key elements:
- Spaces – Each space represents an organizational account, with proposals and votes associated with specific spaces. Creating a space on Snapshot requires an ENS domain, serving as the only requirement from Snapshot’s side for space setup.
- Proposals – Users can then create proposals within a space and cast their votes accordingly. Space administrators have the authority to define rules for proposal creation and voting by configuring voting and validation strategies.
- Votes – votes decide whether the proposal passes or gets rejected. Users vote and their voting power is often linked to the token holdings within the wallet connected to the account.
The platform at https://snapshot.org provides a simple to user interface for setting up a proposal. In this example for Arbitrum, only users holding a minimum of 500k tokens can create a proposal and voting power is proportionate to the balance of Arb tokens in the users wallet.
Token holders can then vote on the proposal which often acts as a temperature check for the community. The backend checks that the user has the required tokens on-chain which provides off-chain voting privileges.
There is no code executed in the same way an on-chain DAO vote would run a command if successful. The Snapshot voting system provides guidance and a verifiable result to the projects team.
Snapshot is free to use and enables communities to engage with their members and encourage them to be active in the governance of the project. It is perhaps, alongside Aragon, becoming the industry standard for DAOs to build proposals and develop roadmaps with their community in the driving seat.
There is support for multiple voting systems such as single choice, approval voting, and quadratic voting. The platform also enables flexible voting strategies, enabling customization of voting power calculations. Users can leverage ERC20 tokens, NFTs, POAPs and other contracts to shape their voting influence.
Snapshot is open-source on Github and distributed via an MIT license which is great for developers who want to build on it or do custom integrations.
With Snapshot, decentralized communities can enjoy a seamless and inclusive governance experience, devoid of gas fees and tailored to their specific requirements.
While it detracts away from the on-chain voting mechanics of many DAOs and the ethos that code is law, it does offer a very simple and user-friendly way to get community input on a project.
