Snapshot Adds 'Shielded Voting' for DAOs to Help Solve Voter Apathy
The voting-as-a-service platform Snapshot is rolling out a new feature that would let DAO members vote on proposals privately. Create an account to save your articles. Transparency has long been an ideal of blockchain enthusiasts and an essential feature for DAO governance. Now, that may be changing, and it's not all bad. To limit the downsides of transparency and protect voters from what it calls the "tyranny of the masses," the popular DAO voting site, Snapshot, announced the launch of shielded voting today. A decentralized autonomous organization is an organizational structure where control is spread out rather than hierarchical. They also typically use smart contracts on a blockchain, with participants using governance tokens to transparently vote on proposed actions. Snapshot believes DAO governance is still in its infancy, and transparency has allowed more democratic oversight. However, as DAOs mature, the project says this transparency hints at certain less-desirable characteristics. "On the one hand, the transparency of digital governance has been one of DAOs strengths because of the element of social control around votes," Snapshot ecosystem lead Nathan van der Heyden tells Decrypt. "On the other, having the results updated with each vote can lead to voting apathy, lowered participation, and information asymmetry." Often is the case that when potential voters see that an important issue is being dominated by, say, a handful of whale tokenholders, they may withhold their vote. The thinking goes that "if you see your option winning strongly, it may not be worth your time to vote," he said. "And if you see your option losing strongly, why would you waste your time trying to help it?" It's a minor adjustment for some, but van der Heyden says private voting could resolve this "low-hanging fruit" of voter apathy. Unpacking shielded voting
Launched in August 2020 by Snapshot Labs for the Balancer community, Snapshot is a free-to-use platform that has become a popular place for over 2,000 decentralized communities to gauge member sentiment on a particular course of action. Snapshot partnered with Shutter Network , a layer-2 project aimed at preventing front running on Ethereum, to launch the voting update using threshold cryptography . Threshold cryptography or encryption is a technique that enables a group of key holders to provide a cryptographic lock. A lock can only be opened if a threshold number of members collaborate. "This ensures that neither a single party nor a colluding minority of Keypers can decrypt anything early," Luis Bezzenberger, product manager at Shutter, told Decrypt via Telegram. "Nor can they stop the DAOs from revealing the results of a vote. The protocol functions as intended as long as a certain number of Keypers (the ‘threshold’) are well-behaved and act honestly." Front running in voting is when an observer can see how a vote is progressing and then take action, so their desired outcome occurs. Snapshot to give DAOs ‘as many options as possible’
Snapshot says shielded voting can be enabled in the DAO's admin view and will encrypt individual votes until the proposal reaches its end. Van der Heyden says the aim is to provide a good middle ground between transparency and privacy. While the proposal is ongoing, the only available information for anyone, including Snapshot, will be the total amount of voting power already deployed. "When voting ends, all votes are revealed - as well as who voted for what," Van der Heyden continued. "In that sense, we don't lose many benefits, but we will certainly miss the sense of urgency that can arise in tightly contested votes." Snapshot cautions DAOs that the shielded voting feature should be considered in beta and may contain bugs. "Our philosophy is to give as many options as possible to DAOs. There is still so much to explore and figure out - we want to make sure they have the tools to do so," Van der Heyden said. Copy link

Snapshot Adds 'Shielded Voting' for DAOs to Help Solve Voter Apathy

This iframe contains the logic required to handle Ajax powered Gravity Forms. Recent data shared by Snapshot Labs’ Electric Capital Engineer Emre Caliskan shows that DAOs have increased in number by 8.8 times to 6000. The number of proposals and votes has seen a similar jump, with an increase of 8.5x in proposals and 8.3x in votes. Source: Electric Capital
Although these findings point to a rising interest in DAO models, most of the increased activity was experienced by a small number of already popular DAOs. Most new proposals came from 10% of DAOs, while 60% of DAOs have had only 3 proposals since their foundation. A recently leaked draft of an upcoming bill shows that regulators will soon be looking closely at all crypto platforms and protocols to safeguard users. This oversight may cut back on some of the freedom DeFi and DAOs have been enjoying so far and ask them to register with the government, as well as disclose the identity of their founders and users. Meanwhile, Tron DAO, which is responsible for managing the algorithmic stablecoin USDD, bought $50 million worth of Bitcoin to “ safeguard the overall blockchain industry and crypto market” . This move comes after stablecoin Terra’s fall from grace, prompting Tron to increase the capital backing for USDD to prevent a similar crash. The company will start publishing real-time data from June 5 on Tron DAO Reserve . 0 comments on “Data Snack: DAOs are gaining traction with consumers as well as regulators”
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Data Snack: DAOs are gaining traction with consumers as well as regulators

The past week in DeFi saw the launch of another $100M fund by Solana and the number of DAOs surged over 8X with increased protocol activity. 281 Total views
Newsletter
This past week, the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem was ruled by decentralized autonomous organizations and new fund launches for the growth of the Web3 ecosystem. The total number of DAOs surged by eight times while Solana launched a $100 million DeFi fund. Optimism, an Ethereum layer-2 protocol that Vitalik Buterin recently praised for its governance model, lost 20 million tokens due to a mix-up of layer-1 and layer-2 addresses. A leaked 600-page copy of a United States crypto draft bill also grabbed the community’s attention, as it proposes heavy regulatory scrutiny for DeFi and DAOs. The top-100 DeFi tokens showed mixed market performance, with several tokens registering double-digit gains in the last seven days, while a significant majority remained bearish on the weekly charts. Number of DAOs increases 8x along with a spike in votes and proposals
The total number of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), the number of governance proposals put forward and the number of votes cast have all seen astounding growth over the past 12 months. Data compiled by Snapshot Labs and shared by Electric Capital engineer Emre Caliskan in a Thursday tweet highlighted that DAO numbers have increased over eight-fold, from 700 in May 2021 to 6,000 now. The number of proposals has increased by 8.5 times, and the number of total votes has increased by 8.3 times over the past 12 months, from 448,000 to 3.7 million. Solana Ventures sets up $100M fund for GameFi and DeFi in South Korea
Solana Ventures and the Solana Foundation have formed a $100-million fund to help support the growth of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) , blockchain gaming and DeFi projects in South Korea. In addition to supporting projects built on Solana, the fund will help keep some Terra-based projects afloat following the collapse of that ecosystem last month. Leaked copy of the U.S draft bill shows DeFi and DAOs under regulatory lens
A leaked copy of a United States draft bill concerning cryptocurrency started doing the rounds on Twitter earlier on Tuesday. The 600-page copy of the leaked bill highlights some of the key areas of concern for regulators including DeFi, stablecoins, decentralized DAOs and crypto exchanges. User protection seems to be the primary focus of regulators, with policies intended to require any crypto platform or service provider to legally register in the U.S., be it a DAO or DeFi protocol. Optimism loses 20M tokens after L1 and L2 confusion exploited
The honeymoon period for the Optimism layer-2 scaling solution has been cut short, as an exploit in its market maker’s smart contract led to the loss of 20 million OP tokens. The exploit took place on May 26 but has only just been reported to the community. One million tokens valued at about $1.3 million were sold on Sunday. An additional 1 million tokens valued at about $730,000 were transferred to Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum address on Optimism earlier today at 12:26 am UTC. The remaining tokens are dormant for now but could be sold at any time or used to sway governance decisions. DeFi market overview
Analytical data reveals that DeFi’s total value locked registered a slight dip over the past week, with the value dipping below $80 billion again. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView reveals that DeFi’s top-100 tokens by market capitalization registered a week filled with volatile price action but broke out of the bearish trend over the past couple of days. The majority of the DeFi tokens in the top-100 ranking by market cap traded in the green, Chainlink ( LINK ) was the biggest gainer with a 29% surge, followed by Theta Network (THETA) with a 17.2% rise. Tezos ( XTZ ) registered a 14.14% price rise, while PancakeSwap ( CAKE ) grew by 1.23% over the last seven days. Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us again next Friday for more stories, insights and education in this dynamically advancing space.

Finance Redefined: Number of DAOs surge, Solana launches $100M DeFi fund

Snapshot Labs Raises $4 Million to Shape Future of DAO Voting
The popular voting platform for DAOs is filling its coffers to be ready for the future. Ethereum
In brief
The raise was led by 1kx, an early-stage token fund. Voting is at the heart of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs , allowing members to voice their opinion on matters like project funding and protocol adjustments. And Snapshot has become the go-to mechanism for tracking member views. But with thousands of groups now using it, the platform needs more resources to scale for the future. To that end, Snapshot Labs announced today a $4 million seed raise led by 1kx , an early-stage token fund. Other participants include Coinbase Ventures, The LAO, MetaCartel Ventures, Gnosis, StarkWare, BoostVC, Scalar Capital, Fire Eyes DAO, LongHash Ventures, and Coopérative Kleros. Launched in August 2020 by Snapshot Labs for the Balancer community, Snapshot is a free-to-use platform that has become a popular place for over 2,000 decentralized communities to gauge member sentiment on a particular course of action. By connecting to Ethereum wallet MetaMask , the tool verifies that users indeed hold tokens in the project and are therefore eligible to vote. But everything happens off-chain and no tokens actually get moved. Snapshot helps determine whether there is enough interest to move forward with an official referendum, in which tokens are used to cast votes. Snapshot CEO Fabien (who requested not to share his last name) told Decrypt that the open-source tool is ready to expand. "The raise was mostly done to grow the team of contributors to build a better Snapshot," he said. Specifically, he says users can expect significant improvements on the Snapshot voting framework. "One of the biggest improvements we will do is called 'StarkVote,'" Fabien said. "It's a solution that we are working on with StarkWare ; the goal for us is to make off-chain voting as robust and secure as on-chain voting." Honored to work with @StarkWareLtd team on StarkVote! Voting on L1 is not going to scale, with #StarkNet it will and without security tradeoffs. Wait for it! https://t.co/eTs5QAsIMu
StarkWare is an Israeli-based company launched in 2018 to provide scalability and privacy solutions to blockchains . "Our goal is to enable inexpensive, trustless voting to be settled on-chain," said StarkWare Head of Product Avihu Levy during a presentation at DAOist Lisbon in October. "We want to remove the need for expensive on-chain checkpoints." Snapshot labs say over 1 million votes have been cast on Snapshot to date. Earlier this month, Snapshot integrated the Colony protocol , a DAO framework to incentivize engagement and generate revenue and growth, to add DAO reputation scores to the voting platform. "Voting is our only focus," Fabien said. "We want to make it more accessible, more secure and more scalable." https://decrypt.co/86481/snapshot-labs-raises-4-million-shape-future-dao-voting

Snapshot Labs Raises $4 Million to Shape Future of DAO Voting

DeFi Tool Snapshot Now Using Colony to Rebalance Power in DAO Voting
Snapshot is integrating the Colony reputation system to make DAO decision-making more equitable and transparent. This story comes out of PubDAO , a decentralized news wire. In a move that could make blockchain -based voting more transparent and democratic, decentralized voting platform Snapshot —one of the primary tools Web 3 groups use to poll community sentiment—has partnered with blockchain protocol Colony to integrate its DAO reputation system. Governance tokens are the crypto assets used to decide the future of a decentralized autonomous organization, also known as a DAO. The community uses governance tokens to vote on project funding proposals, elections, and other measures. However, similar to stocks in a company, those who hold more tokens usually get their way. An unfortunate side effect is the centralization of power among a few whales within an ostensibly decentralized organization. By using Colony's reputation system, Snapshot wants to make the decision-making process more equitable. Launched in August 2020 by Snapshot Labs, Snapshot has become a popular platform for DAOs to gauge member sentiment toward a particular course of action. Several DeFi companies and DAOs use the free, decentralized voting system to facilitate voting on proposals. Colony, meanwhile, relaunched on the xDAI chain for payments in February 2021. It's a DAO framework to incentivize engagement and generate revenue and growth at a lower cost than with plain Ethereum . Votes on Snapshot can now be weighed against the contributor's "reputation score," which incorporates measures of a contributor's previous work, how much that work was worth, and what peers thought of it. That means that a contributor's reputation can influence the number of tokens they receive for their engagement over time. "As the DAO ecosystem grows," said Snapshot Labs' Head of Growth Nathan van der Heyden, "it seems likely that we'll see a proliferation of new governance modalities like Colony's Reputation system, which seek to address the social scalability limitations of token voting." Van der Heyden believes using Colony's reputation system is a natural fit for Snapshot because Colony is focused on on-chain governance and has received several user requests for similar features. And Colony co-founder Jack du Rose sees the integration of the Colony reputation score to the Snapshot UI as a way to increase the social aspect of voting. "There is a growing demand from DAOs to integrate systems that represent more fairly their involvement in their community in terms of the voting power," du Rose told Decrypt. "DAOs are all about community, so anything we can do to help encourage further involvement in DAOs is excellent progress." https://decrypt.co/85171/defi-tool-snapshot-using-colony-rebalance-power-dao-voting

DeFi Tool Snapshot Now Using Colony to Rebalance Power in DAO Voting

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