Crypto Sapiens - Snapshot | Digital Governance - Nathan VDH
Primer: Snapshot is an off-chain gasless governance tool for DAOs and crypto projects. In this episode of Crypto Sapiens, host Humpty Calderon invites Nathan van der Heyden, ecosystem lead at Snapshot, to share about the beginnings of Snapshot and how they are planning to improve governance participation.
Background
Ecosystem lead at Snapshot
From a young age, he was interested in political philosophy
Went to university for political philosophy
Decided to focus on big tech as they had too much power
Felt frustrated as there’s not much a single person can do
Discovered Ethereum and found it liberating
Started writing crypto articles
Joined SIMETRI, the research arm of Crypto Briefing, where he does deep dives into protocols
Met Fabien, the founder of Snapshot
Joined Snapshot in Aug 2021
On Blockchains
Blockchains are not inherently good or bad
Blockchains are platforms for you to build on
Voting is a good use case for blockchains as they can be used to prove that votes are not tampered with
Voting on Ethereum cost money
Snapshot provides a cheaper but still cryptographically secure way to vote
What Is Snapshot?
Snapshot started in Aug 2020 when Balancer, a DEX, needed a solution for people to participate in governance
Fabien created Snapshot to address this need
More DAOs started to use Snapshot until it became a key governance piece in the ecosystem
It also relies on off-chain elements
The off-chain elements are decentralized using IPFS, a decentralized storage system
Voting On Snapshot
Voting is done via tokens — includes NFTs, ERC-1155s, staked tokens, etc.
Have flexibility to define what counts as voting power:
Amount of actions you’ve done on a blockchain
Number of days that you held a certain token
Snapshot is 100% free to use. There’s no ads, data harvesting, etc.
Why Do DAOs Need Voting?
Two kinds of DAOs:
Community/Social DAOs — have to make decisions and to give them a sense of community
Financial/Investment DAOs — voting is key to the functioning of the project
“Google's motto is don't be evil. I think Web3’s motto is can't be evil. It's about not being able to do bad things, not not doing bad things because we are good people. The idea is to remove a central point of failure from the equation.”
- Nathan van der Heyden
The Future Of Snapshot
Snapshot wants to be completely neutral
Partnering with Starkware to build Snapshot X, a governance/voting tool on Layer 2
Will be introducing a mobile app to increase governance participation
What Excites Him?
When people use crypto and don’t even realize it
Buying music NFTs and the royalties going directly to the artists
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