Description of work

In this work, we want to analyze Snapshot, which is a decentralized voting system, from different perspectives, including:

1 - Introducing Snapshot

• 1-1 What is Snapshot?
• 2-1 What problem does it solve?
• 3-1 How does it work?
• 4-1 Challenges

2 - Analyze Snapshot data on Ethereum

• 1-2 The total number of proposals and spaces
• 2-2 Proposals and spaces with the highest number of voters
• 3-2 The most active addresses (based on the total number of votes, votes in proposals, votes in spaces, and creating proposals)

1 - Introducing Snapshot

• 1-1 What is Snapshot?

  Snapshot is a decentralized voting system that allows users to create proposals and vote off-chain. Snapshot allows users to choose from multiple voting systems and use ERC-20s or NFTs to calculate voting power.

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• 2-1 What problem does it solve?

  Snapshot gives users the tools to customize governance for their community. Instead of using Discord reactions or Google forms, Snapshot allows users to carry out governance in an organized way. It makes governance more accessible and affordable since the data is stored off-chain.

To get Snapshot data, you need to use the GraphQL API that is described in docs.snapshot.org/graphql-api

• 3-1 How does it work?

  Snapshot contains multiple spaces with each space consisting of proposals voted on by the community.

  Spaces: Each space is associated with a project and can contain a list of all the proposals that can be voted on.

  Proposals: Each proposal can be scheduled to be voted on by the token holders in a space. Users can describe the proposal, add options to vote on, and select the voting strategy.‍

  Voting Type: Each voting type calculates the weight of an individual wallet differently:‍

  • Single Choice Voting: Each voter can choose a maximum of one option to support with their entire voting power.
  • Approval Voting: Each voter can select multiple options and their voting power will be distributed equally among the selected options.
  • Quadratic Voting: Voters spread their voting power across options. The number of voters is weighted higher than the number of votes than an option receives. This method of voting removes power away from the whales in your ecosystem. Learn more here
  • Ranked Choice Voting: Voters rank options from most preferred to least preferred. Votes are counted for each voter’s top choice. If an option has more than 50% of the votes based on first-choice, that option wins. If not, the option with the least votes is eliminated and this process is repeated until a clear winner emerges or there is only one option left.
  • Weighted Voting: Similar to Approval voting where voters can select multiple choices, but voters are allowed to choose how much of their voting power to allocate to each vote.

  Start Date and End Date: Allows users to specify when a proposal goes live and stops accepting votes. It is important to specify a window that is not too short to allow the community members to have ample time to vote.

  Block Number: Gives users the ability to decide who can or can’t vote, minimizing the chance that proposals will be influenced by a recent purchase of tokens by a Whale or by spreading tokens across multiple wallets.

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• 4-1 Challenges:

  • An ENS name is required to use Snapshot, which may be a barrier for those who are new to web3 or those that cannot afford to purchase one.
  • Snapshot supports multiple chains, but each space can only be tied to one chain.

• Snapshot support 93 different blockchains.()

• Technical details about the blockchains supported by Snapshot are available on the Snapshot GitHub

Source: daomasters.xyz

You can find more details about Snapshot in docs.snapshot.org

2 - Analyze Snapshot data on Ethereum

• In flipsidecrypto, only Snapshot data related to the Ethereum blockchain is available. So we only analyze this data.

• This data is in the [ethereum.core.ez_snapshot] table, and data are from 2020-07-18 onwards.

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1-2 The total number of proposals and spaces

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Observations

• The total number of spaces in the snapshot on Ethereum is 6278; this number of spaces includes 52.2K proposals.

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• The highest number of proposals are related to pancake(1979 proposals), snapshot.dcl.eth(1294 proposals) and cake.eth(1109 proposals), respectively.

• The largest number of proposals were created in 2022(26598 proposals -

  From the beginning of 2022 until August 13, 2022), 2021(23816 proposals), and 2020 (1772 proposals), respectively.

2-2 Proposals and spaces with the highest number of voters

Observations

• The proposals with the highest number of voters are Ratification of the ENS DAO Constitution (84348 voters - created in 2021)

  , Arbitrum Odyssey Poll 1 (52607 voters - created in 2022),

  and Arbitrum Odyssey Poll 2 (47792 voters - created in 2022), respectively.

• The spaces with the highest number of voters are cake.eth (109120 voters)

  , ens.eth (86002 voters), and arbitrum-odyssey.eth (65443 voters ), respectively.

3-2 The most active addresses

Observations

• So far, 5.63 million votes have been cast by 965K unique addresses.

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• On average, each unique address has participated in voting about 6 times.

• The addresses with the highest number of votes are tlmlit.eth (2816 votes)

  , denet.eth (1019 votes), and wenyuxin.eth (991 votes), respectively.

Observations

• The most active addresses based on votes in different spaces are 222985.eth (voted in 425 spaces), 0x0201.eth (voted in 32 spaces), and socket5.eth (voted in 289 spaces), respectively.

• The most active addresses based on created proposals are 0x5E23D08324f017d5425e59A2782C9ae27aCE0958 (1095 proposals), 0x2Ba0352480bd1Ea073A83e6639b06362131894CE(228 proposals), and 0x724061efDFef4a421e8be05133ad24922D07b5Bf (210 proposals), respectively.

Conclusion

• In this work, we first introduced Snapshot, then analyzed its data in Ethereum.

• Snapshot is a decentralized voting system that allows users to create proposals and vote off-chain. Snapshot allows users to choose from multiple voting systems and use ERC-20s or NFTs to calculate voting power.

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• Snapshot gives users the tools to customize governance for their community. Instead of using Discord reactions or Google forms, Snapshot allows users to carry out governance in an organized way. It makes governance more accessible and affordable since the data is stored off-chain.

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• Snapshot support 93 different blockchains.

• The total number of spaces in the snapshot on Ethereum is 6278; this number of spaces includes 52.2K proposals.

• So far, 5.63 million votes have been cast by 965K unique addresses.

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• On average, each unique address has participated in voting about 6 times.