Introduction to Snapshot

This page intends to give you a brief explanation of what Snapshot is and how it works. It also provides you with all the necessary information to get started.

Welcome to Snapshot!

Snapshot is a voting platform that allows DAOs, DeFi protocols, or NFT communities to vote easily and without gas fees.

The tool allows high customization of the voting process to cater to the diverse needs of the users and organizations. Customization includes different aspects like calculation of the users' voting power, selection of the voting mechanism, proposal and vote validation, and many more.

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

Key features

• Free usage - create spaces, proposals and take part in organization's governance without any gas fees

• Signed messages - votes are cast through signed messages easily verifiable online

• Multiple voting systems - Single choice, Approval voting, Quadratic voting, and more

• Flexible voting strategies - customize how the voting power is calculated through single or combined strategies that enable voting with ERC20s, NFTs, other contracts, and more

• Proposal and voting validation - utilize Gitcoin Passport, POAPs or other solutions to validate who can create a proposal or cast a vote

• Custom branding - spaces can use their own branding, color schemes and domain name

• Fully open-source with MIT license - our code can be viewed on Github at https://github.com/snapshot-labs/

How does it work?

There are three key elements that are involved in the voting process: spaces, proposals and votes. Proposals and votes are associated with a space, while each space is an account (profile) of an organization.

You will need an ENS domain in order to create a space on Snapshot, which is also the only requirement from Snapshot's side to set up a space.

Users can then create proposals for the space and vote on them. Space admins can define the rules for proposal creation and casting a vote by setting up voting and validation strategies. For example only users holding a minimum of 10K of specified token can create a new proposal and the voting power of users is proportional to the balance of the specified token in their wallet.

For more details about the voting process and customization have a look at the detailed pages of our documentation.

Where to start?

This guide is meant for all existing and future Snapshot users. Therefore regardless whether you are new to Web3, want to create a Space for your organization or are a contributor working on custom voting strategies, you will be able to find resources for your own use case within our documentation.

Spaces

I want to manage my organization's account on Snapshot.

Proposals

I want to create a proposal.

Voting

I want to vote on a proposal.

Contribute

I want to create a new strategy, a plugin or contribute to the codebase.

Tools

I want to integrate Snapshot in my product, use API or get notifications about new proposals.

If you don't know where to start or have a specific question, head to the FAQ section!

FAQs

Contributing

We want to create a product which is easy to use by anyone - technical and non-technical, Web3-native or completely new to the space.

As open-source mindset and community are at the heart of Snapshot we are inviting you to contribute with general feedback, code, code review, design, bug reports, advice, documentation, or anything else you can think of.

Head to Contributing to learn how you can help us enhance Snapshot!

What’s next?

The next part of the guide will take you through the steps of creating a space on Snapshot. It will also take you through the process of registering an ENS domain if you do not have one already.