What is Snapshot?
Snapshot is an off-chain voting platform designed to facilitate decentralized governance for DAOs, DeFi protocols, and NFT communities without incurring gas fees. It allows users and organizations to customize their voting processes, including how voting power is calculated, the selection of voting mechanisms, and the validation of proposals and votes. This high degree of customization ensures that Snapshot can cater to the diverse needs of various decentralized communities.
Key features of Snapshot include gasless voting, which makes it accessible and cost-effective, and support for multiple voting systems such as single choice, approval voting, and quadratic voting. The platform also offers customizable voting strategies, allowing voting power to be calculated through single or combined strategies using ERC20 tokens, NFTs, and other contracts. Proposal and voting validation can be integrated with solutions like Gitcoin Passport and POAPs to ensure secure and legitimate voting processes. Additionally, Snapshot is fully open-source under the MIT license, enabling spaces to use their own branding, color schemes, and domain names for a personalized experience.
Snapshot operates through three main elements: spaces, proposals, and votes. Spaces act as an organization's account on Snapshot, where proposals are created and votes are cast. To create a space, an ENS domain is required, which serves as the only on-chain transaction necessary to set up on Snapshot. Once a space is created, users can submit proposals and vote on them according to the rules defined by the space's administrators.