What is Snapshot?

Did you ever think that true democracy could exist in crypto space? Did you ever think that voting could become a reality in the crypto world? Well, Snapshot has made this possible!

Snapshot is a voting mechanism based on IPFS decentralized storage system, used by various crypto projects to access, review and study their user base via polling and conduction of surveys. In other words, it is an off-chain, gasless, multi-governance polling dashboard made for the community for receiving their feedback and opinions to reshape the decision making. Snapshot has emerged as an interactive medium and an efficient platform wherein crypto based projects can create proposals for users to vote on using their cryptocurrency.

Voting platforms such as Snapshot are already playing and would continue to play a pivotal and a critical role in determining the future of DAOs, blockchain communities and the ecosystem as a whole.

Salient Features

• Gasless Voting - No payment of fee required to execute the voting transactions
• Verifiable Votes -All the votes are faithful and authentic and thus they can be tested for their veracity
• Multiple voting Systems -Snapshot has intertwined a number of versatile voting systems to enable a user engaging mechanism.
• Flexible Voting Strategies- The voting strategies can be amended and edited as well.
• Custom colour scheme- The candidate posting the proposal can alter the color combination as per his choice. 
• Custom domain name- A customized domain name can be chosen. Though it is optional it offers numerous advantages.
• Fully open source with MIT License
  

Usually voting using cryptocurrencies involves high fees to execute the transactions, but in case of snapshot no fees is incurred as it is a gasless and off-chain platform. On-chain verification is not required for the vote signalling process due to the usage of a decentralized storage network called IPFS.

How does Snapshot help DAO?

Snapshot is at the forefront of innovating DAO participation by creating equitable and customizable participation structures across all DAOs for proposals, discussion and voting. The Decentralized Autonomous Organizations facilitate smooth and seamless financial transactions worldwide in a decentralized manner. They operate as an independent and automated system for direct exchange without the presence of an apex body, intermediaries or the hierarchical centralized structures as each organization is collectively owned by the members which completely rules out the unnecessary involvement of government, third parties and bureaucracy barriers. It enables the exchange of values in a trusted, transparent and anonymous system.

 As communities and projects evolve the opinion of the audience begins to carry more and more weight. Thus, it becomes immensely important for the DAOs to get accurate and reliable feedback from their user base. And to serve this purpose Snapshot comes into play!

It is a popular tool for the decentralized organizations to figure out and analyze the viewpoint and opinion of their audience using blockchain technology.

It precisely combines an expansive DAO voting dataset with the capability to produce customizable surveys and polls which accurately reflects the sentiment of the community. As this system is designed to accommodate a wide range of diverse polls and surveys, inclusive participation, collective decision making and inculcation of diverse opinions becomes quite convenient for the organization.

These days, token based voting has become the primary mechanism and a prominent decisive element to decipher a decentralized organization’s progress in the long run.

The fact that there are more than 1000 project proposals on snapshot clearly depicts that how popular it is among the decentralized organizations.

There are a plethora of companies in the decentralized finance space that have utilized Snapshot’s unique polling system to their advantage. Some of the prominent ones include Uniswap, Balancer, Yearn, Bancor, The Graph, Aragon and the list goes on.

Uniswap, for instance, asked its users if it should allocate funds for creation of a legal defence pool if the project ever comes under regulatory scrutiny. In another poll, it asked users about the effective usage of the treasury funds.

How to create a proposal on Snapshot?

In order to create a new proposal on Snapshot follow the below-mentioned steps-

• Firstly, go to any project space and click on connect wallet in the top right corner of the window.
• Connect with wallet provider where you hold relevant tokens and thereafter click on “New Proposal”
• Fill out the Title and summary of your proposal. Mention all the required details.
• Go to the “Actions” box and select the Voting type, start date and end date of your proposal. This would be the time period available to the users to vote for your project. Make sure you allow enough time frame for voting.
• Use the default Snapshot block number or you can change it as per your requirements. The block number is the snapshot where the balance of voters will be counted.
• Here comes the final step! Just click on “Publish” and your proposal is created!

How to vote on Snapshot?

If you wish to vote for a particular project, follow these guidelines-

1. Go to your project's snapshot page.
2. Click on the "Connect wallet" button in the top right corner of the window.
3. Connect with the wallet provider where you hold the relevant token.
4. Click on the option(s) you wish to vote for.
5. Sign the message via your wallet and there you go! Your vote is recorded!

Voting types in Snapshot

Snapshot supports a number of different voting types and they even plan to support many more in the future. It follows a distinct mechanism to ascertain the voting power of each vote. The voting power of each vote can be calculated via the strategy selected in the proposal by the voter. The voting power of each vote by the voter can be distributed across multiple choices which they make during the process. Have a look at the voting types!

1. Single choice voting - Under this system a voter can choose a single option among the various choices available to him. Under this case, the entire voting power would go to the selected choice. 
   

2. Approval Voting - In this case, each voter can approve any number of choices and every selected choice would be given equal voting power.
   

3. Quadratic Voting - Herein, each voter may disperse his voting power across any number of choices and the results would be calculated quadratically.
   

4. Ranked Choice Voting - This is the most interesting voting type present in Snapshot. Here, each voter can rank any number of choices. Votes are initially counted for each voter's top choice. If a candidate has a majority of the vote based on first-choices then that choice wins. If not, then the choice with the fewest votes is eliminated. The voters who selected the defeated choice as their first choice would then have their votes added to the totals of the next choice selected by them. This process of elimination and reducing the choices continues until a choice has more than half or majority of the votes. When the choices are reduced to two, there is a head to head comparison between the top choices!
   

5. Weighted Voting - It is the most customized voting type. Here, a voter can distribute or delegate his voting power among any number of choices as per his wish.
   

Strategies in Snapshot

A strategy is a JavaScript function which is used to return the score for a set of addresses. Strategies are often used on Snapshot to calculate the end result for a proposal. A proposal can have a single or multiple strategies. The default strategy in Snapshot is to calculate the balance of an ERC20 for each voter. 

How to create an ENS Domain?

We present a step by step guide to create a space on Snapshot. To create a space in Snapshot creating an ENS Domain is a prerequisite. Even if you wish to use ethereum testnet or any other network you will still need an ENS domain on Ethereum mainnet.

1. Firstly, search for the availability of your name on ENS by clicking the following link https://app.ens.domains/

2. If the name is available, you would be able to see the 3 steps and the fee for registration. Please note that the names with 5+ characters cost considerably less than the names with 3 to 4 characters. 

3. Connect your wallet by clicking the connect key on the top left corner of the window. Do ensure that your wallet has enough balance to make the transaction successful.

4.After completing the above listed steps, confirm all the transactions for the three steps from your chosen wallet.

5. You have now successfully registered on ENS! Additionally, you can also make your Ethereum address point to an ENS name by clicking on ‘Set Reverse Record’ or by going to 'My Account' and then selecting 'Reverse record' and completing the transaction. Now you are ready to create your space on Snapshot!

How to create a space on Snapshot?

Step 1 - Link your ENS Domain to Snapshot

Once you have created your ENS domain, go to this url and modify the tag with your ENS domain. https://snapshot.org/#/<ENS DOMAIN>/settings and login with the wallet that has the ENS domain. 

Once connected, the <your-address> tag will be replaced with your wallet address.

Step 2 - System setup

If you are on your domain space and connected with your wallet which is used for transactions you will see the correct IPNS link in the ENS field. For getting redirected to ENS page, click on the (Set record on ENS) button.

• After getting redirected on the ENS page, click on ADD/EDIT RECORD.
• Select TEXT option and type "snapshot" in lowercase.

• Thereafter, Paste the IPNS link in the field.
• A blue save button would be visible on the right side of the screen. Click on the Save button.

• Scroll down and click on the Confirm button visible on the bottom right corner of the screen.

• Sign the transaction with your wallet.

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Step 3- Refresh Settings

Refresh the Snapshot settings page https://snapshot.org/#/<ENS DOMAIN>/settings to see the space setting.

Name is the name that will be displayed in your space.

About is the description of your governance purposes.

Avatar is your project logo.

Network must be the network related to your token.

Symbol is the main token symbol that would be displayed in your space.

Skin can either be left as default, used as an existing one or you can even create your own skin too!

Twitter/Github - To add a username to link to your different accounts.

Domain name is optional but you can add a custom domain.

Terms links to your website's terms and conditions.

Hide space from the homepage if you want to keep your space "private".

Strategies- You need to add a voting strategy for your proposals. erc20-balance-of is the most used strategy. You can have multiple strategies and can have your custom strategies as well. You can add up to 5 strategies in your space. 

If you want to add your own customized token you can edit the strategy by clicking on it once selected.

Space Roles

On a space there can be 3 different roles:

Controller- The controller of space can edit all the space settings including theadmins.

Admins-The admins can edit the space settings (except the admins list) . Also, they can archive the proposals.

Members- Members can post proposals regardless of their voting power.

Similar Products 

Since the interest of crypto agencies in collecting user base data is rapidly gaining momentum, there are a couple of other platforms which work in a similar manner just like Snapshot to record and communicate such information. Some of the prominent ones other than snapshot are mentioned below-

Boardroom- Boardroom is a simple user friendly and research oriented interface for engaging, signalling, and voting on protocol decisions using an integrated platform to improve distributed decision making. It offers blockchain voting with the maximum voter privacy.

DXDao- Voting mechanisms similar to Snapshot are also present in DxDao. The dxDAO uses the Alchemy Earth user interface developed by DAOstack for its governance. This interface is meant to make collaborative decisions about various issues associated with a project.

Tally- Tally is a voting dashboard which extracts the data from decentralized finance protocols and thereafter provides it in real-time for research, analysis and future decision making.

Orange (Le Vote)- Stephane Richard, the CEO of the Orange group, presented Le Vote. It’s a blockchain solution for companies and public entities which is designed to organize ultra-secure polls and get employee or citizen opinion regarding diverse matters and fields.

Here, Each vote is encrypted using a new encryption mechanism before submission. For each encrypted score in the vote, proofs are generated and stored. Everyone can use these proofs to verify the correctness and the eligibility of each submission without decrypting the content of the vote. This ensures the validity of the submitted votes in the counting process and at the same time it also maintains confidentiality.

As this voting solution is based on blockchain, it secures the organization and results of a poll.

Le Vote guarantees the secrecy of the vote by using a transparent and anonymous mechanism without any personal data being stored in the databases of the service providers and app developers.

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Links

Follow Snapshot on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SnapshotLabs

Join the Snapshot Discord: discord.snapshot.or

Official  website link: https://snapshot.org/