What is Realms?

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 multisig, 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.

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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.

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Questions

What trends do you see between governance behavior between the two chains?

Does a platform seem to capture more market share of its users on their respective chain than the other?

What seems to influence voting behavior on each platform?

Does one platform have more proposals and voting opportunities than the other?

Are whales more powerful on Realms or on Snapshot?

How can each platform become more decentralized?

Realms

Realms vs Snapshot

Snapshot

In the first part, I calculated some total information for Realms and Snapshot.

Total number of unique voters on Snapshot is much more than Realms (about 250 times).
Total number of votes on Snapshot is much more than Realms (about 248 times).
Total number of unique proposals on Snapshot is more than Realms (about 11 times).
Total number of unique voters on Snapshot is much more than Realms (about 14 times).

Following topics shown in this dashboard for Realms and Snapshot:

Based on this section:

The difference in the total number of unique proposals and DAOs between Realms and Snapshot is not as much as the total number of votes and unique voters.
Totally, Realms doesn't bother Snapshot in all the above metrics.

As I said, since the starting date of the data in the two tables is not the same, then part of this difference could be guessed. In order to provide the same conditions for comparison, we use the average of the said metrics.

This metrics are average of all previous charts in above.

As you can see, the stark difference between Realms and Snapshot disappeared and now it is possible to better comment on them.

The first interesting point is that the average number of votes given by each voter in Realms and Snapshot is almost the same, and both are equal to 5.2.
On average, 111 votes have been given for each snapshot proposal, while this number is 5 in Realms.
On average, 916 votes have been given for each snapshot DAO, while this number is 53 in Realms.
On average, 21 unique votes, voted for each snapshot proposal, while this number is around 1 in Realms.
On average, 173 unique votes, voted for each snapshot DAO, while this number is 10 in Realms.
On average, there are 8 proposal in each snapshot DAO, while this number is around 10 in Realms.

Based on this section:

Realms is ahead of Snapshot in the number of votes per voter and the number of proposals per DAO, but it is behind in other metrics.

In this section, we look at each of the metrics on a weekly basis. The below charts give us a better view of the Realms and Snapshot trends over time.

The most important chart among these charts, in my opinion, is the chart of the number of new voters each week.

As you can see, Snapshot has more new voters than Realms, so we're seeing an all-time high in the last week. While in Realms, the trend is different and in the last week, it had only 56 new voters.

The total number of votes per week in Snapshot is increasing while decreasing in Realms.
The new voters per week in Snapshot is increasing while is decreasing in Realms.
The new proposal per week in Snapshot is decreasing while is increasing in Realms.
In both Snapshot and Realms, the number of new DAOs per week hasn't displayed any notable trend.

In this section, I will compare the voting power of the voters in each of the platforms to determine the whales and whether the platform is centralized or not.

This chart shows how many voters fall into each group.

As you can see in the snapshot, most of the voters have a power between 0 and 10 (about 4.3 million people) and as their power increases, the number of people who have that power decreases, so that only 52 thousand people have a higher than a billion power.

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In Realms, the situation is slightly different, where only about a thousand people have a power between 0 and 10, and the rest, about 25 thousand people, have a power between 10 and 100.

According to this chart, it can be said that the number of whales in Snapshot is much more than the number of whales in Realms, and it can even be said that we don't have whales in Realms.

Methodology

To answer this question, I used ethereum.core.ez_snapshot table for Snapshot data and solana.core.fact_proposal_votes table for Realms data.

All metrics calculated easily from above tables.

I should mention, I didn’t consider any time limitation for queries. Therefore, since Snapshot data is available from July 2020 and Realms data is available from November 2021, then part of this difference is conceivable.

Total number of unique voters.
Total number of votes.
Total number of unique proposals.
Total number of unique DAOs.
Average number of votes per voter.
Average number of votes per proposal.
Average number of votes per DAO.
Average number of voters per proposal.

Average number of voters per DAO.
Average number of proposals per DAO.
Number of votes per week.
Number of new voters per week.
Number of new proposals per week.
Number of new DAOs per week.
Distribution of voting power.
Distribution of total voting power.

This chart shows total powers of voters fall into each group.

Whales have the majority of voting power, as you can see in the snapshot.
In Realms, all voting powers belong to groups that had between 10 and 100 powers. The interesting thing is that people who had between 0 and 10 powers (in the previous chart) actually had 0.

According to this chart, we can say that we are seeing a decentralized community in Realms, while Snapshot seems much more centralized. Whales have very high power in snapshot and can change the proposals in their favor.

Conclusion

Based on total metrics, Realms doesn't bother Snapshot in number of votes, number of unique voters/proposal/dao.
Based on average metrics, Realms is ahead of Snapshot in the number of votes per voter and the number of proposals per DAO, but it is behind in other metrics .
Snapshot has more new voters than Realms, so we're seeing an all-time high in the last week. While in Realms, the trend is different and in the last week, it had only 56 new voters.
The number of whales in Snapshot is much more than the number of whales in Realms, and it can even be said that we don't have whales in Realms.
We are seeing a decentralized community in Realms, while Snapshot seems much more centralized. Whales have very high power in snapshot and can change the proposals in their favor.

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