Snapshot Labs is pleased to announce the launch of Snapshot X, our new fully onchain voting protocol integrated seamlessly into the recently launched Snapshot v2 interface.
Snapshot X combines the best of both worlds: the security and verifiability of onchain voting and trustless execution, plus the frictionless ease and modularity that Snapshot is known for. With Snapshot X, DAO communities can continue to enjoy the best governance user experience while adding on the security guarantees that ensure the preservation of Web3’s core principles: resilience, censorship resistance, and immutability.
The journey to Snapshot X
Snapshot began as an offchain solution that cut the friction and cost of participating in DAO governance relative to available options, as well as providing a vast and flexible design space for customizability and new functionality. This philosophy, as well as a strong emphasis on design and user experience, catapulted Snapshot into becoming not only the most popular Web3 governance tool but also one of the most used apps in the entire space. Today, 96% of DAOs and 500,000 monthly active users are on Snapshot.
While Snapshot’s offchain solution has proven to be ideal for many DAO use cases, it does not fully cover the needs of DAOs that require more robust decentralization and trustless execution. At the same time, the Snapshot Labs team has always envisioned Snapshot growing to include an onchain solution, and has noticed pain points in onchain governance that are important to solve.
Onchain voting, before Snapshot X
While onchain voting has been around for a long time, it has left a lot to be desired. Governor— the voting protocol that currently accounts for most of the onchain voting is the most battle-tested option out there, which is attractive from a security perspective. However, it requires a lot of sacrifice in usability, cost, flexibility, modularity, and feature set. It has generally been viewed as the only option, albeit a suboptimal one.
While most DAO governance tokens live on L1, voting on L1 faces scalability issues and can be prohibitively expensive.
Snapshot X fixes this.
How Snapshot X is built different
Storage proofs
A core innovation of Snapshot X lies in using storage proofs to verify balances across different chains, enabled by our integration with Herodotus. Conducting onchain voting on L1 incurs high costs for voters. Since most governance tokens in the Ethereum ecosystem are held on L1, storage proofs come in handy as a way to verify one’s token holdings on L1 and to allow voting with those tokens on L2, where the cost of computation is significantly less. Beyond this, Snapshot X’s storage proofs not only work for tokens, but also for verifying any contract state variable. This means that NFTs, badges, custom shares, or anything else that is onchain can be utilized as voting power. And this is done without ever needing to bridge assets.
Why Starknet?
Snapshot X conducts onchain computation on Starknet to make the cost of voting 10x- 50x cheaper than L1 and cutting the cost of making a proposal or updating a DAO’s settings by 200x. This is all while delivering the same security guarantees as voting on L1 as space settings, proposals, and votes are published and verified onchain on Starknet. Starknet’s unique approach is designed for performance, making it possible to run large computation cheaply.
Since the framework is entirely permissionless, anyone can interact with it onchain without going through the Snapshot client. Also, since Starknet supports native Ethereum cryptographic signatures, users don’t need to change the way they interact with Snapshot; you can keep using your favorite EVM wallet (ie MetaMask, Rabby, etc.).
We have designed Snapshot X such that any interaction with Starknet is abstracted away from the user and into the background. Therefore, regardless of the ecosystem(s) where your DAO members are active, they will have a familiar and native experience when creating proposals and voting on Snapshot X.
Voting strategies
The modular design of Snapshot X enables bringing the familiar customizable Snapshot experience onchain. Snapshot aligns with the philosophy of Turing complete governance; the concept of a governance system with arbitrary programmability. This allows complex and expressive mechanisms of coordination to be seamlessly integrated into governance decisions.
Voting strategies, a key feature of Snapshot’s offchain solution, are also a powerful component of Snapshot X. These are contracts used to determine the voting power of users in a DAO, which can be created permissionlessly. They enable DAOs to determine and define in a contract how voting power should be calculated, based on their own innovative ideas. Voting strategies can be changed, enabling a DAO to modify their governance model if needed without redeploying their governance.
The Snapshot offchain DAO community has already developed over 400 unique Voting strategies that are available for any community to use or iterate upon. We look forward to seeing the proliferation of onchain Voting strategies on Snapshot X.
Voting with diverse tokens
Unlike other onchain voting solutions which can only utilize tokens or NFTs that have an ERC-20 or ERC-721 Votes extension, Snapshot X’s storage proofs and voting strategies enable the use of any contract state variable on Ethereum for use as voting power. This allows DAOs to go far beyond what’s possible when using Governor. This is a major unlock for NFT projects in particular which often does not use the ERC-721 Votes extension.
Gasless onchain voting
One of the most popular features of Snapshot’s offchain solution is voting via signature without incurring any gas costs. On Snapshot X, users can still enjoy this same experience while creating proposals and voting fully onchain by signing a message.
This is made possible by allowing DAOs on Snapshot X to opt into sponsoring gas fees for governance. Thus messages would be sent to Mana, which acts as a meta-transaction relayer, broadcasting votes and proposals onchain on layer 2.
Proposal validation strategies
Staying on the theme of modular strategies, Snapshot X spaces can use Proposal validation strategies to determine who is authorized to create a proposal. In other words, the logic that determines who is allowed to add a proposal can be different from how voting power is calculated for voters. Proposal validation can, for example, be based on requiring users to have a certain threshold of voting power or it can be based on a whitelist. Similar to other strategies, these are modular and any user can write their own.
Execution strategies
Similar to the modularity of Voting strategies, Execution strategies allow DAOs to leverage modular strategies that define the conditions under which a proposal would pass or not, as well as defining how a proposal is to be executed. There is currently 3 execution strategies available, a cross chain execution to execute transaction on L1 when a proposal pass on Starknet, a Timelock execution and an execution using a Safe module (Zodiac). It is also possible to have multiple Execution strategies, such as one for normal votes and one for emergency votes with a higher quorum that can be executed directly.
How Snapshot X changes governance
Snapshot has been utilized in different ways by various DAO communities according to their specific needs. While most DAOs rely on Snapshot as their sole or primary voting solution, some DAOs that require onchain voting have been using Snapshot as a temperature check solution, within a stack of voting tools. This is because DAOs consider Snapshot as the most convenient and easy protocol and interface through which to run a vote.
Now with Snapshot X, the friction of substituting alternative solutions into different parts of the voting and execution flow is no longer necessary. Within the same easy to use interface, DAOs can run both offchain and onchain votes, simplifying the otherwise convoluted governance process.
With the addition of Snapshot X, Snapshot is now an all-in-one solution for voting and execution. Pairing that together with Snapshot v2’s new Discussions integration and Delegation dashboard, it’s now possible to unite DAO governance activities on one popular platform, making life a little easier for DAO citizens.
Snapshot X is available today on Starknet and EVM chains: Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon and Arbitrum. Cross chain voting and execution is only available on Starknet.
Snapshot X security
Snapshot X smart contracts have been audited by OpenZeppelin and ChainSecurity, the results are available here. The Snapshot X contracts, frontend and infrastructure are fully open source.
Getting started with Snapshot X
Snapshot X is now live and available to all DAOs on the Snapshot v2 interface. Get started by creating your own space in a few simple steps here or read our docs here.