What is Snapshot ?

Snapshot is a decentralized voting system. It provides flexibility on how voting power is calculated for a vote. Snapshot supports various voting types to cater to the needs of organizations. Creating proposals and voting on Snapshot is user-friendly and does not cost gas as the process is performed off-chain.

In short, Snapshot is an off-chain gasless multi-governance client with easy to verify and hard to contest results.

Key Features:

• Free (gasless) to create proposals and vote on them
• Votes are signed messages easily verifiable online
• Multiple voting systems - Single choice, Approval voting, Quadratic voting, and more
• Flexible voting strategies to calculate voting results - vote with ERC20s, NFTs, other contracts, and more
• Spaces can have their branding with custom color schemes and domain name
• Fully open-source with MIT license

What is a DAO ?

At its simplest, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a community with a shared bank account. Members of the DAO make decisions in a transparent and decentralized fashion, with smart contracts executing these decisions.

For instance, a member can create a proposal suggesting an investment of the treasury or a program upgrade. The DAO members then come together to vote on the proposal. If a predefined quorum votes for the proposal to pass, the proposal is accepted and and executed by a smart contract.

As a result, the DAO structure provides a “flat” organizational structure. Each DAO member has a voice in the community and the opportunity to drive the direction of the organization.

What is Realms?

Realms is a tool to help the community thrive on Solana DAO creation, voting, and treasury management, all in one fully on-chain product. Whether managing a multi-sig or a billion-dollar protocol, Realms has the tools to enable the community to reach its full potential. Realms provides a platform for builders on Solana to create a DAO, manage their members, vote on proposals, and allocate their treasury. Whether you are running a multi-sig, NFT community DAO, or community token DAO, Realms has the tools and integrations to help your community flourish. Realms serves as the frontend for SPL Governance, a DAO-type and asset-type agnostic standard for building and maintaining DAOs on Solana.

Some of the thriving communities are Grape, UXD, Mango, Monkes & 800+ more DAOs

Methodology:

In this dashboard, We are going to compare Realms vs Snapshot overall stats ,voting activity, voters activity and behavior, proposals, DAOs, whales activity and some similar things.

Since Realms is a newbie platform comparing to the Snapshot, the difference between numbers on these 2 may be somehow high. But, In order to achieve a fair result, I will use some Average metrics too, to let justice be done!

The main tables that we are going to use to analyse data are ethereum.core.ez_snapshot and solana.core.fact_proposal_votes (filtering results to where governance_platform is realms).

Based on the above and left charts, the number of casted votes and also voters on Snapshot is way more than Realms.

Also, the average number of daily votes and voters in Snapshot is way more than Realms.

Moreover, Average number of votes and voters per DAO on Snapshot is also way more than Realms.

Also the number of votes and voters per DAO on Snapshot is way more than Realms.

But, according to the left chart, the average number of votes per user on Realms is more than Snapshot. We can conclude if the number of voters on Realms was as high as Snapshot, the results would be more close maybe.

On the above charts, We can see the number of DAOs and also their proposals in Snapshot is more than Realms.

Moreover, the average daily number of proposals and DAOs on Snapshot is more than Realms. The difference between these metrics are not high as number of votes and voters.

But, the average number of Proposals on DAOs on Realms is more than Snapshot! Maybe we can conclude the DAOs on Realms are more active than Snapshot DAOs in an average scale.

On the above charts, we can clearly see that Realms data are way newer than Snapshot since they have started from December 2021.

On all charts, we can see an increasing positive overal trend over time till today.

The highest activity on Snapshot voting have achieved during April 2022 and also November 2021. On realms, this activity reached its ATH during May and June 2022.

Also on the above charts, we can see the cumulative number (growth rate) of votes and voters on Snapshot is way more than Realm. but dont forget that Realms is way more newer than Snapshot and its trend slope is satisfyingly positive.

According to the left chart, a regular voter on Snapshot have cast way more votes than a regular voter on Realm.

As we see, the number of voters with between 11 - 25 Votes on Snapshot is the highest among other types. On the second rank, there are users with 1 Vote.

On realm, most number of users have cast only 1 Vote. the second rank also belong to the users who cast between 2 to 5 Votes.

So, the voters on Snapshot are more active than Realm. But dont forget that number of proposals on Realm is also way less than Snapshot.

According to the above chart, the daily number of New voters on both platforms is positive over time and the overal trend of Snapshot is more increasing than Realms.

The day with the most new voters on Snapshot was 9 November 2021. the day with the most new voters on Realms was June 2022.

According to the left chart, the most number of Snapshot votes have resulted in Yes/For/Accept or Other Votes (because votes on Snapshot can be a explained thing)

Also the most number of votes on Realms is Yes.

According to the left data, the average difference between 2 vote on Realms by a voter (5.59 days) is way less than time difference between 2 votes on Snapshot (9.61)

This means, the voters on Realms are more active than Snapshot in terms of time difference between 2 seperate votes.

For this part, First I have calculated the total number of Ethereum,Avalanche,Polygon,Gnosis,Arbitrum,Optimism and Binance Smart Chain users from their Core_Transaction tables for Snapshot (there are total 31 networks on Snapshot table, some of them are testnet and some of them are not available on Flipside tables, So the mentioned blockchains are the most available ones) and Solana users for Realms.

Then I have calculated the percentage of Realms and Snapshot voters to the total related blockchain users.

As we see, The Snapshot platform seems to capture more market share of its users on its respective chain than the Realms.

According to the above charts, The most active DAO with the most number of votes on Snapshot is Arbitrum-odyssey. Arbitrum Odyssey is a multi-week initiative for exploring the Arbitrum ecosystem with exclusive NFTs as rewards.

But in terms of number of voters, We can see TBCC.ETH and also CAKE.ETH on the first and second ranks. both of these are exchanges. TBCC Exchange is a leading cryptocurrency trading platform in the world with the largest liquidity pool powered by Binance Cloud. PancakeSwap is a decentralized exchange native to BNB Chain. In other words, it shares some similarities with established platforms like UniSwap in that users can swap their coins for other coins without the input of middleman services.

In realms, the top DAO with the most number of voters by far is The Imperium of Rain.

But in terms of number of votes, the Grape DAO is the most popular one, The Grape DAO is the governing body of our decentralized community. It has one main goal: Guarantee the success of Grape by harnessing and coordinating the incredible power of community's effort, ability, and potential.

the UXD protocol which is on the 2nd rank of the most popular DAOs in terms of votes is the most popular DAO. UXD Protocol is decentralized. UXD Protocol does not custody user assets, and users will not interact with any centralized entity

On the above charts, we can see the Top 5 popular proposals and their DAOs on Snapshot.

As we see, The most popular proposal is “Ratification of the ENS DAO Constitution” on ens.eth DAO (Read more about this proposal).

The interesting thing is that TBCC.ETH and also Arbitrium-Odyssey.eth DAOs have 2 of the top 5 popular proposals on Snapshot.

And on the above charts, we can see the Top 5 popular proposals and their DAOs on Realms.

As we see, The most popular proposal is “Fourth Time a Charm” on The Imperium of the Rain DAO and its about Sending 1 RAIN to TRASH! (Read more about this proposal).

Also, the main category of most of this proposal is about burning some tokens and also doing some test/bug bounty on the related platforms.

The interesting thing is that 4 of the Top 5 popular proposals on Realms belong to the Imperium of the Rain DAO.

For analysing the whales activity on Snapshot and Realms, I have used 2 different methods:

• First Method is by Wallet Balance: I have exctracted the top 200 wallets with the most balance (USD for Ethereum users, SOL for Solana users) and i have considered these users as whales. then I have calculated the percentage of these whales to the all Snapshot/Realms users.
• Second Method is by Voting Power: I have extracted the top 50 voters with the most voting power on Snapshot and Realms and i have considered these users as whales. Then I have calculated the percentage of these whales to the all Snapshot/Realm users.

In both of these methods, Realms (Solana) whales are more active than Snapshot whales.

Conclusion

Based on the above analysis:

• Snapshot is way larger than Realms in all terms (number of votes, number of voters, number of DAOs, number of proposals, etc) and it has larger DAOs compared to Realms. Considering that Realms is way newer than Snapshot.
• Realms voters are more active than Snapshot voters and the difference between their votes is less than Snapshot. The average cast vote per user on Realm is more than Snapshot users.
• Most users in Realm have only cast 1 Vote but users with +10 votes on Snapshot are way more than other types.
• More related-blockchain users are participating in Snapshot votes compared to the Solana users who are participating on Realms.
• There are more whale activities on Realms compared to Snapshot.
• The proposals which are related to DAOs, Coins or Tokens, and DEXs are the 3 most popular types of proposals and voters tend to participate and vote more on these types.
• Moreover on Realms the top proposals are mainly about burning tokens or doing some experiments/bug bounties/test on the related platform.
• Arbitrum-odyssey and TBCC.ETH is the most popular DAOs on Snapshot.
• The Imperium of the Rain and Grapes are the most popular DAOs on Realms.
• Most voters have voted “Yes” for their participating proposals on both platforms.
• There is an increasing positive overall trend of votes and voters over time till today for both platforms.
• The highest activity on Snapshot voting have achieved during April 2022 and also November 2021. On realms, this activity reached its ATH during May and June 2022.
• The most number of daily newly created proposals have achieved on 21st November 2021 and it’s because of the Snapshot platform. For the Realms platform, We have the most number of daily newly created proposals on August 2022.
• Both platforms have gained a high number of new users (voters) during the year 2022. (recent weeks for Snapshot and mid-2022 for Realms)

==Discord: Ali3N#8546==

On the above chart, I have assumed the first (minimum) vote date for each proposal as the creation date of that proposals. So, Based on this method, We can see the number of daily new created proposals on each Platform over time.

As we see, most number of daily new created proposals have achieved on 21st November 2021 and its because of Snapshot platform.

For realms platform, We have the most number of daily new created proposals on August 2022.

For analysing that what seems to influence voting behavior, I have decided to analyse Snapshot votings and categorize them into different types:

First, I have listed the top 100 proposal_titles and also proposal_descriptions by their number of votes and voters to check them overally and be able to categorize them into correct types.

Then, I have created 17 most popular categories that were listed among the top 100 list and calculated the number of votes and voters for each category as below charts:

Overal Stats

Voting Behavior

Market Share

Top DAOs and Proposals

Whales Activity

Based on the 2 above charts, the proposals which are related to DAOs, Coins or Tokens and DEXs are the 3 most popular proposals on Snapshot and included the most number of votes and voters among other types of proposals.

Popular Proposal Categories

How can platforms become more decentralized?

While decentralization of power is a complex issue, some ppl don’t believe that simply putting everything on a blockchain is the answer.

Both Snapshot and Realms are actually centralized platforms where users vote by signing with their wallet’s keys. It’s a good way to do Sybil-resistant polling, but there is no ability to enforce that the team or the multi-sig holders execute the governance proposals. Moreover, centralization has one clear benefit: accountability. For example, should users lose funds, companies like mine would be legally liable to return them to these clients by any means necessary. Contrast this to incidents like MakerDAO’s Black Thursday, where customers lost millions in unfair liquidations because someone was able to bid almost 0 DAI for each ETH.

So, In my opinion, these DAOs should mainly focus on doing sth useful about decentralizing their accountability with a very low risk of losing funds or such problems as what MakerDAO experienced. On the other hand, Centralized platforms usually do not accept to pay lost fund of users to them because they believe blockchain and DAOs have their own risk but anyway these risks should be minimized to the zero.

But, to be honest, there are some benefits of keeping things centralized before they are ready enough to become dentrealized because DAOs aren’t perfect yet and They are an extremely new technology that has attracted much criticism due to lingering concerns regarding their legality, security and structure. DAOs hacks also raised security concerns, as flaws in smart contracts can be hard to fix even after they are spotted. DAOs can be distributed across multiple jurisdictions, and there’s no legal framework for them. Any legal issues that may arise will likely require those involved to deal with numerous regional laws in a complicated legal battle.

While both these methods have their pros and cons, SnapShot and realms combine only the good. these are platforms where projects can ask for the opinions of their users. It is off-chain, so it requires no development and can be used across all blockchains.