Snapshot is an off-chain voting platform that allows DAOs, DeFi protocols, or NFT communities to vote easily and without gas fees. Today, communities use a variety of tokens or NFTs to represent voting power: the number of votes a certain address has in a DAO. With voting validation, communities can now decide who gets to vote on a certain proposal, even before calculating voting power. What does that mean?

What?

Communities that enable voting validation will be able to set specific criteria their members need to meet in order to be able to vote. We are lucky to be releasing voting validation alongside the Gitcoin Passport team, so DAOs will be able to gate voting behind any of the criteria that Passport has defined such as: linking to Twitter, owning an ENS or a POAP, connecting your GitHub account, and many more.

Why?

By adding a voting validation strategy such as Gitcoin Passport, you’re able to require your users to verify some non-identifiable information about them that shows they’re likely to be human. This unlocks many possibilities for your DAO, most importantly to become more democratic. Being democratic in blockchain governance is always complicated, as you need to account for sybil attacks. Any person can create a lot of bots to abuse a democratic voting system in a DAO. By gating the voting process with Gitcoin Passport, you can be more confident that votes are coming from real humans.

This also unlocks one of the most interesting voting systems on Snapshot, quadratic voting. Quadratic voting reduces the voting power of whales to give the large majority of smaller users a bigger say in governance. For more information about quadratic voting, head to this page.

How?

To enable voting validation, head to your space settings to enable it under “validation”. Then, select the stamps, which are the conditions that matter for your space. You can also decide if they need to meet all of these criteria or only one. The more criteria you select, the more sybil resistant you can make your voting process.

When?

Voting validation is live today! For now, Gitcoin Passport is our only validation strategy, but that might change very quickly. If you’re interested in building a validation strategy, please reach out to us on our Discord!

Thanks for reading, and we hope you’ll love voting validation. If you have any questions or difficulties setting it up, let us know!