Performances
Comparison
Details
This content is generated by RD AI and is for reference only
Snapshot is a decentralized off-chain voting platform designed for DAOs and crypto communities. It allows users to create proposals and vote without paying gas fees, with identity verified via digital signatures. The platform supports multiple voting strategies (e.g., token balance, NFT holdings, or delegated weight) and multiple voting types (e.g., single choice, multiple choice, ranked choice). Snapshot stores data on IPFS and exposes a public GraphQL API via Snapshot Hub.
Follow Updates
Follow Lists
People
About Snapshot
Snapshot is a decentralized voting platform widely used by DAOs. Its core business is off-chain voting: users sign messages with their wallets to vote, avoiding on-chain transaction fees. It supports customizable voting strategies and integrates with multiple chains, making governance lightweight and accessible.
Its main value proposition is modularity and low cost. Unlike fully on-chain voting, Snapshot stores votes off-chain via IPFS while keeping them verifiable. This lowers participation barriers and allows communities to tailor voting rules to their needs. It has become a standard tool for DAO governance.
The problem it solves is the high cost and complexity of on-chain voting. Traditional on-chain voting requires gas fees and technical expertise, discouraging participation. Snapshot removes these obstacles, enabling broader community engagement while maintaining transparency.
Regarding recent developments, no reliable information is available for the specified period. The platform has continued its role as a leading governance tool, but specific updates cannot be confirmed.
Snapshot, launched in 2020 by Fabien during his time at Balancer, emerged as a gasless, off-chain voting platform built on IPFS, fundamentally lowering the barrier to DAO governance participation.
In November 2021, Snapshot completed a $4 million seed funding round, providing resources to scale its infrastructure and expand its core team.
A pivotal technical evolution came in August 2022 with the integrator update: deprecating the EIP-191 personal sign format in favor of EIP-712 typed data, removing support for future snapshot block numbers, and introducing the 'app' parameter and voting power API. These changes enhanced security, scalability, and third-party integration capabilities.
By August 2023, the platform hosted over 21,000 spaces, including major protocols like Aave, Uniswap, PancakeSwap, and Sushi, cementing its position as the de facto standard for on-chain governance signaling.
In August 2025, Polygon's refusal to pay Snapshot fees highlighted growing tensions around the sustainability of free governance infrastructure, signaling a potential shift in the platform's economic model.
Over the past six months (2026-03-07 to 2026-09-07), Snapshot has made significant strides in on-chain governance. The platform now natively supports OpenZeppelin Governor and Governor Bravo, enabling DAOs to run the full governance lifecycle—from temperature checks to on-chain voting and execution—entirely within Snapshot. This includes gasless voting via relayers, a delegates dashboard, vote history tracking, and an execution builder with ABI auto-detection and Tenderly simulation.
Snapshot X, the fully on-chain voting protocol built on Starknet, has been further developed, leveraging storage proofs via Herodotus to verify token balances across chains without bridging. This reduces voting costs by 10-50x compared to mainnet.
A major focus has been shielded voting, with ENS DAO actively considering adopting it. Votes are encrypted during the voting window and decrypted after closing, ensuring information symmetry. Looking ahead, Snapshot is working on permanent private voting via threshold homomorphic encryption, expected in the coming months, with ENS potentially prioritized for this next stage. The roadmap emphasizes expanding on-chain execution capabilities and deeper cross-chain integration.
Founder & CEO (no other co-founders identified): Fabien Marino (Twitter: @bonustrack87). Former Balancer developer; created Snapshot in 2020, using off-chain signatures and IPFS storage to enable gasless voting, later becoming a mainstream DAO governance platform.
Core executives:
- Laurent Genoud: Operations Lead, responsible for platform operations.
- Christian Cerullo: UX/UI Designer, responsible for product experience and interface design.