What is Solanan?

Solana (CRYPTO:SOL) is a blockchain platform known for its speed and efficiency. SOL tokens are its native cryptocurrency and are used to pay its transaction fees. Since launching in 2017, Solana has grown to become one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world.

What is a DAO?

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is an emerging form of legal structure. With no central governing body, every member within a DAO typically shares a common goal and attempt to act in the best interest of the entity. Popularized through cryptocurrency enthusiasts and blockchain technology, DAOs are used to make decisions in a bottoms-up management approach.

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. Realms has the tools and integrations to help multisig, NFT community DAO, or community token DAO to run. Realms serves as the frontend for SLP Governance a DAO-type and asset-type agnostic standard for building and maintaining DAOs on Solana.

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.

What are the main benafits of Snapshot?

• 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

Methodology

In this dashboard we will compare the voting activity of Snapshot on Ethereum and Realms on Solana. These two voting platforms will be compared on users, active DAOs, Proposals and market share. The data for this dashboard will come from the ethereum.core.ez_snapshot and solana.core.fact_proposal_votes tables from Flipside’s database. Additionally, we will discuss what trends appear and why.

Observations

• In terms of chain market share Snapshot has about 150x the market share on Ethereum as realms has on Solana.
• Each day there is about 10x the number of proposals on Snapshot than on realms, but there is 75x the number of voters on snapshot each day.
• Realms is growing slower than snapshot was when it started in terms of users, DAOs, and proposals.
• Leading up to the release of realms there was a massive spike in snapshot use.

Observations

• DAOs using realms for voting have about 50% more voters than snapshot.
• DAOs have many more proposals on realms than on snapshot by about 30x.
• The average proposal on Snapshot has about 21x the number of votes than votes on Realms.

Observations

• Each day in 2022 there is between 2 and 180 new users using Realms DAO and there is between 1,000 and 33K new Snapshot users.
• There has been a massive increase in users on Snapshot since August 11th.
• Realms has had two large increases in users in April and June of 2022.

Conclusion

Realms has been growing much slower than snapshot in terms of users, DAOs, and Proposals. DAO that used realms have much more proposals on average, but each of their proposals have much less voters on average. Overall snapshot is more popular for larger DAOs that are making less decisions where realms is being used more often for smaller DAOs making many decisions.