TL;DR

  • Recently launched on Starknet, Snapshot X combines Snapshot’s modularity and flexibility with the benefits of fully onchain voting.
  • Onchain voting on Snapshot X is 10-50x cheaper than voting on L1.
  • Snapshot X enables features like cross-chain voting, voting-strategy suggestions, and more.

Intro

Snapshot Labs has just launched Snapshot X, a fully onchain voting protocol integrated seamlessly into the recently launched Snapshot v2 interface. The protocol marked its launch by powering Starknet’s first-ever governance vote on mainnet, cutting the ribbon on the migration of Starknet governance to Snapshot X.

Snapshot X combines the security and verifiability of onchain voting with the frictionless ease and modularity for which Snapshot is known. With Snapshot X, DAO communities can maintain a nearly identical user experience while preserving Web3’s core principles: resilience, censorship resistance, and immutability.

The journey to Snapshot X

Snapshot began as an offchain solution designed to cut the friction and cost of participating in DAO governance, as well as to expand the horizons of customizability for DAO administrators. This approach, as well as a strong emphasis on design and user experience, catapulted Snapshot into becoming the most popular Web3 governance tool and one of the most widely 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 rather than being only offchain.

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 almost all onchain voting execution-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.

Snapshot X offers the first alternative to fill all those gaps.

How Snapshot X changes the game

Built on Starknet

Snapshot X conducts onchain computation on Starknet, making transaction costs 10-50x cheaper than L1, while delivering similar security guarantees as voting on L1. This means space settings, proposals, and votes are published and verified onchain on Starknet.

Since the framework is entirely permissionless, anyone can interact with it onchain without going through Snapshot’s 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 (i.e. MetaMask, Rabby, etc.).

Snapshot X is designed such that regardless of whether users are on Starknet or another ecosystem, they will have a familiar and native experience when creating proposals and voting on Snapshot X.

Storage proofs

The core innovation of Snapshot X lies in using storage proofs to verify balances across different chains, enabled by its integration with Herodotus. Conducting onchain voting on L1 is costly for voters, which is a bit of a problem considering most governance tokens in the Ethereum ecosystem are held on L1.

Storage proofs come in handy for verifying one’s token holdings on L1, enabling voting with those same tokens on L2, where the cost of computation is significantly lower. In addition to tokens, Snapshot X uses storage proofs to verify any contract state variable, NFT, badge, or custom shares as voting power.

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: a governance system with arbitrary programmability. This allows complex and expressive coordination mechanisms 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. In other words, a DAO can determine and define in a contract—based on its own innovative ideas—how voting power should be calculated in its community.

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 available for any community to use or iterate upon—with more to come.

Use diverse tokens for voting

Unlike other onchain voting solutions that can only utilize tokens or NFTs with an ERC20-Vote extension, Snapshot X’s storage proofs and voting strategies enable using any contract state variable on Ethereum for use as voting power. This allows DAOs to go far beyond what’s possible when using Governor.

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.

Snapshot X makes this possible by allowing DAOs 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.

How Snapshot X changes governance

Snapshot has been utilized differently 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 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 feature and Delegation Dashboard, it’s now possible to unite DAO governance activities on one popular platform, making life a little easier for DAO citizens.

Getting Started with Snapshot X

Snapshot X is now live and available to all DAOs on the Snapshot v2 interface. Follow these simple steps to create your own space.