Snapshot is the most widely used voting platform in DAO governance — so ubiquitous that “taking a vote” in most DAOs means opening a Snapshot proposal. Built by Snapshot Labs and launched in 2020, it lets a community poll its token holders off-chain: votes are cryptographic messages signed with a member's wallet and stored on IPFS, so voting costs no gas and anyone can verify the tally without trusting the organizers. It is the signaling layer that sits above a DAO's discussion forum and below its treasury. (Snapshot docs)

How off-chain voting works

A DAO creates a “space” — its governance home — and configures a strategy that tells Snapshot how to read voting power (typically the balance of a governance token, snapshotted at a fixed past block so votes cannot be inflated by tokens bought after the proposal opens). Members then vote by signing a structured message; nothing touches the chain, so there is no gas fee and no on-chain footprint. The signed ballots and the final result are pinned to IPFS, making the vote publicly auditable but non-binding by default — Snapshot records what the community wants, it does not itself move funds. (voting guide)

Voting strategies

Snapshot's flexibility comes from its pluggable strategies. A space can weight votes by plain token balance (one-token-one-vote), by quadratic rules, by delegated power, or by more exotic measures (LP positions, NFT holdings, vote-escrow locks), and it supports ranked-choice, approval and weighted ballot types. This is why Snapshot underpins so many different governance models without each DAO needing to write its own tallying code.

From signaling to execution

Because a Snapshot vote is off-chain, it must be carried out somewhere. The dominant pattern is a two-stage flow: a Snapshot “temperature check” establishes consent cheaply, then the result is executed by a Safe multisig — often wired automatically through Zodiac / SafeSnap (oSnap), which lets a passed Snapshot proposal trigger an on-chain transaction under an optimistic challenge window. This keeps day-to-day voting gasless while preserving a real on-chain outcome. (on-chain vs off-chain voting)

Snapshot X: on-chain voting

To close the trust gap in that hand-off, Snapshot Labs built Snapshot X, a fully on-chain voting protocol that brings proposals, voting-power computation and execution into smart contracts while keeping the familiar Snapshot interface. It runs on Starknet and EVM chains (Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, Arbitrum) and uses storage proofs to verify a voter's token balance trustlessly across chains — pushing computation onto Starknet to make voting and proposing far cheaper than executing the same logic directly on Ethereum L1. (Snapshot X docs)

Strengths and criticisms

Snapshot's strength is friction: free, fast, verifiable polling drove its near-universal adoption. Its most-cited weakness is the flip side — classic off-chain votes are signaling, not binding execution, so a DAO still relies on trusted signers (or an oSnap-style bridge) to honour the result, and the same low friction that boosts turnout also makes vote-buying and delegate apathy easy. Snapshot X is the ecosystem's answer to the first critique; the second is inherent to token voting itself.

How Caper approaches this

Caper collapses the signaling-then-execution split that Snapshot spans. A Caper proposal is voted and executed in one binding on-chain flow — there is no separate off-chain poll to later ratify, and no multisig standing between the vote and the outcome. Weight is read from a past snapshot block, the same defence Snapshot spaces use against last-minute token loading. The trade-off is the mirror image of Snapshot's: Caper gives up gasless convenience to make every vote directly enforceable.

References

• Snapshot, Documentation.
• Snapshot Labs, Snapshot X (on-chain voting protocol).
• Tally, On-chain vs off-chain voting.
• a16z crypto, DAO governance FAQ.