Snapshot：a Decentralized Voting

Snapshot Labs is a decentralized voting system used by crypto projects to poll their user bases. The information services provider was founded in 2021 by an unknown person whose pseudonym is Fabien Fabien. He is listed as both CEO and founder. The CEO had founded the voting protocol as a side project when he was working on Balancer, an Automated provider of liquidity or AMM. In the process of creating a simple voting system as he called it, he realized his idea could do something bigger.

He immediately open-sourced the platform and many yield farming projects grabbed the opportunity attracted by its gasless protocol. Snapshot continued to grow and at writing over 2000 token communities consider it a priceless tool in making governance decisions.
In November of the same year, it was founded, and it raised $4 million seed in a funding round. Drawing investors like 1kx, StarkWare, Scalar capital, LongHash ventures, Kleros, etc.

Top decentralized finance protocols like Aave, Sushi, and Uniswap currently use Snapshot Labs for polls.

Not only that, projects with more intricate interfaces use Snapshot's code at their backend. For example, Ethereum Name Services (ENS) used it to poll partakers of its token airdrop on articles of their project founding documents.

Fabien has his eyes on making Snapshot a project owned by its community and he plans to drop a token in the future. Although for now, they are focused on solving the issue of polling for defi businesses.

Read on to know more about this Decentralized voting system.

What is Snapshot?

---

“Snapshot Labs is an off-chain gasless multi-governance tool for crypto projects to poll their user bases.”This is how snapshot Labs, Inc describes itself on its about page both on LinkedIn and its website. In other words, they offer Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) a tool for conducting their Governance polls easily.

What this means is that snapshot helps multi-governance networks and projects involve their community in their decision-making process. On Snapshot, crypto projects and businesses create propositions for their users to vote on.

Normally this would cost voters gas fees for wallet-to-wallet transactions. However, snapshots use an off-chain verification system based on IPFS, a peer-to-peer storage protocol that does not require any fees. Thus it has become an invaluable tool for many businesses. Over 1000 proposals have been polled on the network so far. Some of the businesses that enjoy the defi voting tool include Decrypt, Balancer, Yearn, Aragon, Uniswap, and many others.

How It Works.

---

Snapshot is a site built to help decentralized finance companies that have a multi-governance structure. Using IPFS, it allows them to create proposals that they can monitor from an interface. Users can eliminate third parties and allow voters to register their opinions without incurring any gas fees. It is favoured by defi businesses for a few reasons among which are:

1. Cost-effectiveness: as mentioned earlier, since its verification system is not on-chain, voters do not have to pay any Gas fees to vote. And businesses can create their proposals for free as well.

2. Multiple voting formats:on Snapshot, you can use whichever voting pattern is suitable for your proposal format.It supports:

• Quadratic Voting
• 
  
• Single Choice
• 
  
• Approval voting

3. It also offers flexible methods of calculating the polls. You can vote with different contracts such as ERC20s, NFTs, etc.

4.Time effective: normally, to conduct polls, businesses have to create their own framework or use centralized methods. Snapshot cuts the extra time and effort the process would take.

5. Safer: The IPFS protocol employed by this voting platform allows proposals to be sent to concerned parties directly and off-chain. This way the votes cannot be interfered with by malicious parties since they are signed messages that can be verified easily.

How to use Snapshot?

---

Creating a proposal.

• 
  
• The first thing is to create a profile on the Ethereum Name Service (ENS)
• 
  
• Create a space on the site and record it on the ENS so that voters can effortlessly find your project.
• 
  
• On the website, open the project space and connect with the wallet provider where you have the relevant tokens
• 
  
• Open a fresh proposal and fill in the necessary details of your proposal; title, and summary. Voting type, the beginning and end date, etc.
• 
  
• You will need a block number which will be provided to you by default. You can decide to use it or create your own. A block number is the Snapshot for calculating the polls
• 
  
• Publish your proposal.

To vote:

• Click on the Snapshot page for the relevant proposal
• 
  
• Connect your wallet to the concerned wallet provider where you hold a token
• 
  
• Proceed to vote
• 
  
• Sign the message with your wallet.
• 
  
• It is as simple as that.
• 
  
• Decentralized voting with zero stress and zero spending.

Tokens and Forks.

---

The CEO and founder of the gasless voting protocol has expressed a desire to make it community-owned shortly(TGE). So there is likely a Token Generation Event in the near future. However, as it stands, he has not revealed any plans for that.

In addition, Snapshot is open source. It has already forked several times, and Fabien continues to encourage contribution and innovations.
Snapshot is a much-needed solution for crypto businesses and projects. It is providing a safe, verifiable, cheap, essentially free vote collating protocol for DAOs



Author: Gate.io Observer: M. Olatunji
Disclaimer:
* This article represents only the views of the observers and does not constitute any investment suggestions.
*Gate.io reserves all rights to this article. Reposting of the article will be permitted provided Gate.io is referenced. In all other cases, legal action will be taken due to copyright infringement.